December 2018 Summaries

As 2018 concludes, Grafana's TimeShift newsletter expresses gratitude to its readers and announces the upcoming GrafanaCon LA event on February 25-26, 2019, featuring TSDB-focused tracks and workshops, as well as an IoT session. The newsletter highlights the release of Grafana v5.4.2, which addresses issues with datasource creation, OAuth settings, and dashboard search, and introduces the Grafana Loki logging project. It also discusses the open-source Cortex platform for Prometheus-as-a-Service, provides guides on visualizing IDRAC sensor metrics and setting up a network monitoring dashboard with Grafana and Prometheus, and announces updates to the Kentik Connect Pro app. Lastly, it previews Grafana v6.0's new panel edit UX, inviting users to try out nightly builds ahead of its February release, and encourages feedback for future content.

The blog post discusses the importance of performance testing RESTful APIs using the Grafana k6 open-source load testing tool, highlighting that REST APIs constitute about 83% of all APIs in use today. Performance testing helps determine the limits of an API, supports Continuous Integration, and aids in achieving Continuous Delivery and Canary Deployment. The guide illustrates load testing with k6, using a local environment to test individual API endpoints, such as the v3/users endpoint, by executing GET and POST requests with varying loads to establish baseline performance thresholds. Initial tests with high virtual user loads resulted in significant timeouts, but adjustments, including adding sleep intervals, led to improved success rates. The script-based approach with k6 also demonstrates testing multiple endpoints using batch requests to simulate concurrent loads, ultimately revealing insights into system performance and prompting considerations for optimization or threshold adjustments.

TimeShift Issue 72 highlights Grafana Labs' participation in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2018, where they announced Loki, a Prometheus-inspired open-source logging project, to a positive reception. The newsletter covers updates such as the release of Grafana v5.4.2, which includes fixes for datasource administration, OAuth settings, and dashboard searches. It also offers insights into recent blog articles and presentations, including the motivations behind Loki and how it contributes to full observability alongside Prometheus and Jaeger. Additionally, it discusses monitoring setups for CrateDB on Kubernetes and time-series analysis with TimescaleDB and Grafana. The newsletter announces changes to the upcoming GrafanaCon, with more TSDB-focused tracks and workshops, and provides updates on plugin enhancements and job opportunities at Grafana Labs. The issue concludes with a community engagement section, inviting feedback and showcasing community contributions on social media.

Loki is an open-source log aggregation system developed by Grafana Labs, inspired by Prometheus, to address the challenges of scalable logging for cloud-native environments. Designed to complement existing observability tools, Loki focuses on simplicity and cost-efficiency, allowing users to seamlessly switch between metrics and logs by leveraging metadata collected from Prometheus. The architecture involves components like promtail for log collection, distributors for data batching and compression, and ingesters for chunk building, with the system supporting horizontal scalability through stateless distributors and queriers. While still in its alpha phase, Loki aims to provide an affordable and easily operable logging solution, inviting community feedback to refine its capabilities for future production releases.

TimeShift Issue 71 covers Grafana's participation and sponsorship at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 in Seattle, where they will showcase a new open-source project and gather feedback on Grafana and its features. The latest Grafana v5.4 release highlights include enhancements such as alerting improvements, MySQL query builder upgrades, and team preferences for personalized dashboards. The issue also discusses articles on monitoring Cassandra with Prometheus and Grafana, exporting alerts from Prometheus to Grafana, and monitoring Kubernetes and server power usage using Grafana dashboards. Upcoming events include GrafanaCon in Los Angeles, featuring TSDB tracks and workshops, and a talk by David Kaltschmidt on achieving full observability with Grafana at the Seattle conference. Additionally, Grafana is expanding its European sales team and highlighted a popular feature request regarding time period highlights on Grafana graphs.

Grafana v5.4 introduces a range of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes to improve user experience and functionality. Noteworthy updates include the new "For" setting in alerting, which minimizes false positives by introducing a pending state before sending notifications, and enhanced support for Google Stackdriver, now featuring templating queries and a custom query editor. The release also debuts a graphical query builder for MySQL, simplifying the process of working with timeseries data, and graph panel improvements that allow for the highlighting of specific time regions. Additionally, team preferences can now be customized for home dashboards, timezones, and themes, with user profile settings taking precedence over team and organization preferences. These updates aim to streamline workflows, enhance data visualization, and offer greater flexibility in user and team settings.

TimeShift's Issue 70, dated December 1, 2018, provides an overview of updates and events related to Grafana, including the release of Grafana v5.3.4 with several bug fixes and a security patch. The issue highlights a range of resources such as a video on "Logging is Coming to Grafana," a talk from AWS re:Invent 2018 featuring Epic Games' use of Grafana, and a comprehensive article on Stack Overflow's monitoring stack. It also introduces new and updated plugins for Grafana, including a preview of Amazon's Timestream plugin for IoT apps and a new polystat panel plugin for visualizing metrics. The newsletter announces upcoming events like GrafanaCon LA 2019 and webinars on using Grafana for time-series data visualization, emphasizing Grafana's growing integration capabilities with tools like TimescaleDB and PostgreSQL. Additionally, it mentions community interactions on social media, inviting feedback and engagement from its audience.