May 2023 Summaries

Grafana Labs has partnered with GitHub to enhance security by implementing GitHub's secret-scanning feature for public repositories, focusing on protecting various Grafana-related secrets such as service account tokens and API keys. GitHub monitors public repositories for leaked secrets and notifies Grafana Labs when any of these secret types are exposed. Grafana Labs uses the Secret Scanning API to verify if their secrets have been made public by comparing hash values. Currently, GitHub can prevent most Grafana secrets from being pushed to public repositories if push protection is enabled, and Grafana Labs supports automatic revocation of Grafana Service account tokens, with plans to expand this support. To enable secret scanning for self-hosted and Grafana Cloud instances, users must follow specific setup instructions, and Grafana Labs is working on improving the remediation process for leaked secrets. Additionally, Grafana Labs has introduced a bug bounty program and encourages users to stay updated with their security releases and blog posts.

ClickHouse, an open-source, column-oriented database management system optimized for analytical workloads, is now integrated with Grafana Cloud for enhanced observability. This integration allows users to monitor ClickHouse instances or clusters by utilizing metrics exposed by ClickHouse and setting up a Grafana Cloud account. The integration includes three prebuilt dashboards—ClickHouse Overview, ClickHouse Latency, and ClickHouse Replica—that display key metrics and alerts related to memory tracking, query performance, disk read/write latencies, and ZooKeeper wait times, which are essential for distributed mode operations. The alerts, such as warnings for replication queue backups and critical alerts for rejected inserts, ensure users can address potential issues promptly to prevent data loss or performance degradation. Grafana Labs emphasizes a "big tent" philosophy, offering a consistent monitoring experience across various data sources, with a free tier available for users to begin leveraging these capabilities.

Grafana Labs is emphasizing its commitment to open-source software with the upcoming GrafanaCON 2023 event, which will be broadcast live from Stockholm. Highlights include the unveiling of Grafana 10, the latest major release of the observability and data visualization platform, and updates to the Grafana LGTM Stack, which includes Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics, and Grafana for visualization. The event will feature sessions on various open-source projects, such as Grafana Pyroscope for continuous profiling, Grafana k6 for performance testing, and the Grafana Agent for telemetry collection. Attendees will have the opportunity to explore significant improvements in features and functionality, as well as learn from expert-led sessions on performance optimization and data management strategies. With a focus on innovation and community engagement, GrafanaCON 2023 promises to provide valuable insights into the latest developments in open-source observability tools.

Seidor Opentrends, based in Barcelona, specializes in IT transformation services and open-source solutions for smart cities, with Sentilo as a key product for sensor and actuator management. Originally developed with the Barcelona City Council, Sentilo is now a robust platform supported by a global community, handling millions of messages daily. To enhance Sentilo's capabilities, Seidor Opentrends integrated Grafana and TimescaleDB, providing customizable visualizations and long-term data storage. This combination allows for efficient real-time data handling and historical analysis, with Grafana offering rich, interactive dashboards embedded in public websites for sectors like noise monitoring and air quality. This setup, used by entities like Barcelona Smart Region and Eivissa, facilitates data exploration and dashboard creation, emphasizing the importance of query optimization for cost-effective, high-performance results. Users have the flexibility to download Sentilo for free, opt for a SaaS version, or request custom solutions.

Managing CVE security vulnerabilities is crucial for maintaining the security posture of software supply chains, as highlighted by recent high-profile breaches. The combination of Grafana, MergeStat, and OSV-Scanner provides a comprehensive open-source solution for vulnerability reporting and monitoring in source code. MergeStat facilitates the synchronization of vulnerability scan results from OSV-Scanner into a PostgreSQL database, allowing for data visualization through Grafana dashboards. These dashboards offer insights into the total count of vulnerabilities, their severity, and distribution across repositories, enabling organizations to prioritize mitigations effectively. By integrating these tools, teams can adopt a "shift-left" approach, running security checks in CI pipelines to prevent insecure code from being deployed. This solution empowers organizations to understand their CVE exposure, focus on critical vulnerabilities, and streamline the process of applying necessary mitigations.

Grafana Labs has introduced Grafana Cloud k6, a platform that integrates the k6 performance testing tool into Grafana Cloud to enhance application reliability and observability. This integration aims to eliminate the gap between performance testing and problem resolution by allowing users to seamlessly transition between both tasks within the same platform. During a recent "k6 Office Hours" livestream, the Grafana k6 team, including developer advocate Nicole van der Hoeven, senior product manager Mark Meier, and frontend lead Simon Legander, discussed the features and benefits of Grafana Cloud k6, such as the ability to query test metrics directly from Grafana Explore and correlate them with observability data. The platform offers a free tier providing 500 virtual user hours monthly, enabling users to start performance testing with significant features. While the legacy k6 Cloud app will continue to be maintained, Grafana Labs plans to eventually migrate users to Grafana Cloud k6, ensuring a smooth transition. Future enhancements include scheduling tests, querying diverse test data, and integrating with other Grafana products like Grafana Tempo to provide additional value.

Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehousing platform, can now be monitored through Grafana Cloud using a dedicated integration that leverages metrics generated by the snowflake-prometheus-exporter project. This integration, embedded within the Grafana Agent, allows users to easily collect and visualize metrics from their Snowflake Data Cloud using Grafana dashboards. To utilize this feature, users must set up a Grafana Cloud account, install the Snowflake Infrastructure Integration via the Connections Console, and configure the Grafana Agent. Once installed, users gain access to pre-built dashboards and a set of six alerts, offering insights into warehouse activity, storage usage, login attempts, credit usage, and more. Alerts are customizable and aim to enhance monitoring of compute and service credit usage, login failures, and overall Snowflake availability. Grafana Labs encourages users to try the Snowflake integration and explore other monitoring solutions available on Grafana Cloud, which offers a free tier and flexible plans to accommodate various needs.

Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud provides customizable dashboards and analytics features for monitoring resource utilization within Kubernetes clusters. Argo CD, an open-source GitOps tool, simplifies the deployment and management of these resources by automating and standardizing configurations across multiple clusters. By integrating Argo CD with Grafana Cloud, users can manage Kubernetes resources more efficiently, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. The integration enables the deployment of Grafana Agent with preconfigured dashboards, alert rules, and recording rules, while also facilitating the collection of metrics, logs, and events from Kubernetes clusters. This approach uses a GitOps-based resource management strategy, ensuring that changes are controlled and maintained within a Git repository as a single source of truth. Users can also leverage Grafana Cloud's prebuilt dashboards and alerts for node observability, cluster efficiency, and overall resource planning, while expanding observability strategies with various integrations and tracing capabilities.

Grafana Labs has introduced a new observability integration for GitLab, enhancing its capabilities to monitor GitLab instances using Grafana Cloud. This integration allows users to collect and visualize various metrics and logs, such as HTTP request rates, request latencies, and CI pipeline creation rates, providing a comprehensive overview of GitLab's performance and system health. The integration requires a Grafana Cloud account and utilizes the Grafana Agent to gather data, offering a pre-built dashboard and alerts for easy monitoring and troubleshooting. It aims to ensure smooth and efficient pipeline operations by tracking metrics like job activations and authentication failures, while customizable alerts notify users of potential issues like high HTTP error rates. This enhancement aligns with Grafana Labs' commitment to delivering a consistent monitoring experience across diverse data sources and environments, supported by a free tier and scalable plans.

Paradigm, a significant player in the cryptocurrency market, has enhanced its observability and logging capabilities by transitioning to Grafana Cloud, leading to improved developer engagement and trust in data. Software Architect Jameel Al-Aziz highlights the shift from an unsatisfactory IaaS provider to Grafana Cloud, which provided scalable, affordable solutions and significantly reduced the time to diagnose and resolve issues. The adoption of Grafana Cloud Logs, powered by Grafana Loki, has transformed Paradigm's developer culture, with increased engagement due to the simplicity and accessibility of the LogQL query language. This transition has led to more data-driven conversations and empowered team members to efficiently analyze and diagnose issues. Paradigm plans to continue evolving its observability stack by adopting additional tools like Grafana Mimir, further distancing itself from legacy monitoring solutions.

Owen Smallwood details his project of using Home Assistant, Prometheus, and Grafana to monitor his natural gas furnace usage during Canada's cold winter months. He aimed to visualize furnace operation times without modifying the furnace by placing a temperature sensor in a heating vent to track temperature increases, which indicate furnace activity. By setting up Home Assistant OS, Prometheus, and Grafana on a home server, and using a Zigbee temperature sensor, Smallwood was able to create a dashboard that visualizes the furnace's running time based on temperature changes recorded every minute. Through Prometheus queries and Grafana's dashboard capabilities, he successfully calculated and visualized the total time the furnace was active, allowing him to analyze the impact of thermostat settings on energy savings. Although his wife opposed lowering the thermostat, Smallwood considered having data to support his energy-saving arguments a personal victory. Looking forward, he plans to use similar methods to monitor his air conditioner's operation and integrate power usage monitoring with the Emporia Vue as part of his home's overall energy observability efforts.

Grafana and Grafana Loki offer powerful tools for visualizing and analyzing logs through customizable dashboards, enhancing the ability to troubleshoot infrastructure and applications efficiently. Grafana, known for its metric visualization capabilities, coupled with Grafana Loki's LogQL query language, allows users to create interactive log dashboards tailored to specific use cases. These dashboards incorporate features such as special filters, pie charts, and data links, which streamline the debugging workflow by enabling quick filtering, aggregation, and visualization of log data. Dedicated dashboards benefit both novice and experienced users by providing pre-filled queries and interactive elements, making it easier to comprehend log data and draw conclusions without extensive manual querying. Furthermore, data links can dynamically filter or drill down into additional dashboards, offering deeper insights and correlations between logs, metrics, and traces. By designing dashboards with clear instructions and user-friendly interfaces, Grafana enhances the adoption and efficiency of log monitoring, making it a valuable tool for both individual users and teams.

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native architectures and tools like Prometheus and Kubernetes, they face challenges in managing the surge of observability metric data, which can lead to increased costs. Grafana Cloud addresses this issue with its new Adaptive Metrics feature, which aggregates unused and partially used metrics into lower cardinality versions to reduce expenses. The upgraded Cardinality Management dashboards further aid cost management by providing insights into high cardinality metrics and indicating their usage status, making informed decisions about metric retention more accessible. While Mimirtool offers similar capabilities, the new dashboards automatically refresh usage indicators every 24 hours and include ad-hoc query logs in their analyses. By pairing these dashboards with Adaptive Metrics, teams can efficiently reduce metric cardinality without disrupting existing systems, as Adaptive Metrics also identifies partially used metrics and optimizes them through an aggregation engine configurable via API or CLI. This feature, now available to all Grafana Cloud users, can eliminate up to 50% of an organization’s time series without compromising observability, offering a scalable and cost-effective solution for managing metric data.

Grafana Cloud has released a significant update to its Linux integration, enhancing monitoring capabilities for Linux nodes used widely across various environments due to Linux's flexibility and reliability. The update introduces a three-tier dashboard system, including a fleet view for managing numerous virtual machines, an overview dashboard for individual node metrics, and drill-down dashboards for detailed subsystem analysis. Additionally, the update includes a Grafana Agent filter configuration to reduce time series data, six new alerts for resource usage monitoring, and annotations for critical events like system reboots. These enhancements aim to simplify the management and observability of Linux systems, aligning with Grafana's focus on metrics, logs, and event correlation to provide a comprehensive monitoring solution.

Grafana enthusiasts are finding innovative ways to incorporate the platform's dashboard capabilities into personal homelab projects, ranging from home automation to fitness tracking. These experimental uses often inspire broader applications beyond typical office environments. GrafanaCON 2023, a major community event scheduled for June 12-14, will showcase various creative projects, including visualizing data on LED matrix displays, automating homes with Raspberry Pi, and using Grafana Cloud for fitness goal tracking. The event will also offer insights into leveraging the Grafana LGTM Stack and other open-source software for diverse applications. Attendees can expect sessions led by experts demonstrating practical applications of Grafana in both personal and professional contexts, such as using Python and Prometheus for triathlon training dashboards. Registrations for GrafanaCON are free, encouraging widespread participation in exploring the platform's potential.

The text explores the concept of social capital within Grafana Labs, emphasizing its critical role in enhancing collaboration in a remote-first work environment. With over 900 employees spanning 40+ countries, Grafana Labs recognizes that personal connections, or social capital, are essential for effective teamwork, especially across different departments and regions. The narrative highlights challenges faced when transitioning to remote work, such as difficulty in cross-team communications and building relationships. It underscores the importance of intentional efforts to foster social capital through practices like personal 1:1 meetings, celebrating team achievements, and creating informal spaces for interaction. The text also mentions the significance of in-person offsites for recharging team dynamics, alongside virtual tools like Slack integrations to facilitate spontaneous connections. Through personal anecdotes, the author illustrates how building trust and empathy can significantly improve team cohesion and productivity, advocating for consistent efforts to maintain and grow social capital in remote settings.

The Canvas panel in Grafana, set to be generally available in Grafana 10, offers customizable visualizations by allowing users to explicitly place elements within both static and dynamic layouts, enhancing the flexibility beyond standard Grafana panels. Originating from a concept similar to the Windows Form Designer, the Canvas panel's stable core structure includes a scene class with a hierarchical element tree, where each element can be tied to data or fixed values. The development process involved significant decisions, such as using the Moveable and Selecto libraries and adopting Figma's constraint system for responsive design. Recent updates in Grafana 9.4 introduced features like connections between elements and data links, which enhance functionality and user experience by allowing more intuitive designs and comprehensive data integration. The Canvas panel's versatility extends its use beyond synthetic monitoring to applications such as office space occupancy tracking. Looking forward, Grafana aims to collaborate with the community to further develop the panel by potentially adding new elements, improving user experience, and integrating with other visualization tools, encouraging users to explore new creative possibilities.

Oracle Database, a widely used enterprise multi-model database system, can now be seamlessly monitored using the newly announced Oracle Database integration in Grafana Cloud. This integration simplifies the process by utilizing metrics from the open-source oracledb_exporter project embedded within the Grafana Agent, allowing users to easily collect both metrics and logs. After setting up a Grafana Cloud account and installing the OracleDB Infrastructure Integration, users gain access to a pre-built overview dashboard and a set of alerts that provide insights into key performance metrics such as resource utilization, wait times, and tablespace capacity. The dashboard offers a comprehensive view of the database state, while alerts notify users of potential issues like session and process limits being exceeded. This integration not only enhances monitoring capabilities but also facilitates troubleshooting by correlating logs and metrics, making Grafana Cloud a user-friendly solution for managing Oracle Database performance.

Grafana Labs has been recognized as one of Inc.'s Best Workplaces for 2023, attributed to its strong company culture that emphasizes openness, transparency, and mutual support among its global team of over 900 employees across 40 countries. The company prides itself on creating an environment where employees feel safe expressing uncertainties, fostering a culture where asking questions and seeking help are encouraged. To support its workforce, Grafana Labs has reintroduced in-person onboarding to promote cross-collaboration and has launched management programs to develop future leaders. Despite challenges posed by the pandemic and economic fluctuations, the company has maintained its focus on team development and relationship building, which it sees as crucial to its success. The company invites potential new hires to explore career opportunities, highlighting its commitment to helping each employee, or "Grafanista," thrive within its supportive community.

Adaptive Metrics is a newly introduced feature in Grafana Cloud aimed at optimizing metrics management by reducing time series cardinality, thereby lowering associated costs. This tool aggregates unused and partially used metrics into lower cardinality versions, helping users manage exorbitant data storage and retrieval expenses in cloud-native environments. By analyzing usage patterns, Adaptive Metrics provides recommendations for aggregating metrics without compromising the functionality of existing dashboards and alerts. The feature is available to all Grafana Cloud users, including those on the free tier, and offers a flexible approach allowing users to tailor aggregation rules based on their unique observability needs. Initial implementations have shown significant reductions in time series volume, with potential savings between 20% and 50% across various user environments.

GrafanaCON 2023 is an upcoming event where users from organizations such as NVIDIA, NASA, DHL, and others will share their unique applications of Grafana, a popular open-source platform for monitoring and observability. The event, running from June 12 to June 14, will feature sessions on various use cases, including NVIDIA's use of Grafana for threat detection, DHL's transformation of IT and business processes, and Sentry Software's reduction of data center energy usage. Participants will also learn about ESnet's development of Grafana plugins for visualizing network data and Daimler Truck's monitoring of high-throughput real-time telemetry data. The event aims to highlight best practices, lessons learned, and the innovative ways the Grafana community leverages the platform to solve complex challenges across different industries.

OVHcloud, a leading European cloud hosting provider, migrated its time series data to Grafana Mimir to enhance its observability platform, which serves 1.4 million global customers. The decision was driven by the need for a reliable, scalable, and compliant remote storage solution that supports multi-tenancy and prevents the "noisy neighbor" effect, ensuring operational efficiency. Grafana Mimir was chosen for its Prometheus compatibility, robust open-source community, and extensive documentation, aligning with OVHcloud's open-source philosophy. Rigorous benchmark testing using Grafana k6 confirmed Mimir's capability to handle high data volumes and growth, reducing complexity and improving cost efficiency. This decision reflects OVHcloud's commitment to transparency and scalability, aiming to contribute back to the open-source community while ensuring a flexible infrastructure for future expansion.

Grafana 9.5 introduces support bundles, a tool designed to expedite and simplify the debugging of Grafana instances by consolidating essential information into a single package. Available across Grafana Cloud, OSS, and Enterprise, support bundles can include data such as version details, resource usage, database information, and user statistics. Users can customize these bundles, sharing them with colleagues or Grafana's support team, with the option for encryption to protect sensitive information. These bundles streamline the troubleshooting process by reducing the need to manually gather data from disparate sources, thus allowing users to focus on problem-solving. Future updates plan to expand the scope of the information included in support bundles, and feedback is encouraged through Grafana Labs Community Slack or GitHub.

Grafana Labs has launched its own bug bounty program to harness the expertise of ethical hackers globally for identifying and responsibly reporting security vulnerabilities in its software. Managed internally to foster stronger relationships with researchers, the program emphasizes speed, transparency, and fair compensation as its core principles. Grafana Labs aims to offer a prompt experience with responses and triages within one to two business days, and payments via the trusted platform Initigriti. The program is hosted on GitHub for transparency, where any changes to scope and terms are publicly recorded, and researchers are not required to sign non-disclosure agreements, allowing them to freely discuss their findings post-release. Grafana Labs, a CVE Numbering Authority, is committed to rewarding high-quality reports with top-tier payouts and bonuses, aiming to strengthen the overall security of its open-source projects and other products. The company encourages continuous engagement from the security community, inviting them to check the program's scope for updates and contribute to its success.

Grafana Agent v0.33 introduces several significant updates, including the introduction of Flow Modules, which allow for the creation of reusable pipelines in Grafana Agent configurations, and a new beta Flow component for monitoring Kubernetes pods using the prometheus.operator.podmonitors. This release significantly expands the Flow ecosystem with the addition of numerous Prometheus exporters for various platforms, such as Windows, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and more, as well as new Service Discovery Flow components for platforms like DNS, EC2, and Azure. The update also incorporates more OpenTelemetry Collector components, enhancing the agent's capability as a vendor-neutral solution, while noting that 32-bit ARM builds are no longer supported due to Go compiler issues and that the Dynamic Configuration feature will be removed in the next release. Users are encouraged to reference the Grafana Agent documentation for detailed guidance and to engage with the community for support and feedback.

Grafana Cloud has launched a public preview of its Frontend Observability service, which provides real user monitoring insights for web applications. This offering, available to all Grafana Cloud users, including those on the free tier, utilizes Grafana Faro, an open-source web SDK, to collect telemetry data that helps Development, Operations, and SRE teams understand and resolve frontend errors. Frontend Observability applies observability principles to client-side debugging, offering insights that are otherwise difficult to obtain due to the complexity of modern frontend applications. The service includes features like Error Awareness, which groups and prioritizes errors to reduce mean time to repair, and provides tools to analyze and resolve errors with detailed stack traces. Users can also build custom dashboards with frontend data stored in Grafana Cloud Logs for enhanced analysis and reporting. This initiative addresses customer requests for tools to monitor frontend applications, complementing existing backend monitoring capabilities. As it evolves towards general availability, Grafana invites user feedback and suggestions for future enhancements through its community channels.

Grafana Tempo 2.1 introduces enhancements to TraceQL, the query language for selecting traces, with new features such as the kind intrinsic, aggregate functions (min, max, sum), and support for arbitrary arithmetic in queries, which improve query readability and functionality. The release also brings performance improvements and an experimental vParquet2 feature for structural operators in TraceQL, along with several bug fixes addressing issues such as float/int comparisons and file handling. Additionally, the update includes breaking changes, notably the removal of search support on v2 blocks and modifications to metric naming conventions. The development team plans to continue enhancing TraceQL and reducing latency in future releases while also working on new features like streaming search APIs and metrics improvements. Users are encouraged to engage with the Grafana Labs community for updates and to explore opportunities with Grafana Labs. Grafana Cloud offers a free tier for users to start with Tempo, providing 50GB of traces, logs, and 10K series of metrics.

The Golden Grot Awards celebrate the most innovative Grafana dashboards of the past decade, showcasing their creators' ingenuity and impact. The awards received an overwhelming response, featuring projects that range from scientific discovery acceleration to Tesla battery optimization. Judges have selected five finalists in personal and professional categories based on technical skill, design, utility, and impact, but the final winners will be determined with the help of public voting, which accounts for 20% of the scoring. Notable personal dashboard projects include a college rocket team dashboard for performance monitoring and a TeslaMate dashboard for electric vehicle metrics, while professional projects feature an AI image analysis performance dashboard and an IoT energy device monitoring dashboard for a Hong Kong school. Winners will be announced live at GrafanaCON 2023, and viewers are encouraged to vote before the deadline on May 5.