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Metrics for all -- and all for metrics. Grafana Labs is on a mission to empower more people with access to data. Here's how and why

Matt from Grafana NYC spent the week visiting Stockholm to focus on v5.0 with Torkel. Despite warnings otherwise, the weather has been beautiful, making a nice backdrop for many UX discussions. Very, very excited to soon show what we’ve been working on. Latest Release Grafana v4.4.3 is Available for download To see the full changelog, head over to our community site. Grafana <3 Prometheus Our very own Carl Bergquist spoke at PromCon 2017 yesterday in Munich, highlighting recent Grafana features and enhancements.

The release of Grafana 3.0 got me a bit nostalgic. Thinking about how much fun I’ve had over the last year. Making friends out of new colleagues. Getting to work with old friends. And finally contributing to open source software. I owe a lot to open source. When we were starting and running Voxel back in 1999, we never would have been a viable company if it wasn’t for projects like Apache, MySQL, CentOS, etc.

Pie charts have been a popular feature request for Grafana, both on our GitHub as well as at conferences and customer meetings. We’ll hear things like “We love Grafana, but we need pie charts for the business guys to use it”, usually accompanied by an eye roll or sigh. We agree. Pie charts are terrible, but they have such a bad rap because people constantly use them incorrectly. We find ourselves having long conversations exploring the vice and virtue of the lowly pie chart, and here’s our perspective.

Symptoms: Gradual global meltdown that’s not DNS. A few months ago, just as we’d started boarding the first handful of users onto the initial alpha of our platform, we received a critical alert early on a Sunday morning: our website was offline. The strange thing was some of us were able to get to it just fine. We’re believers of eating our own dogfood where appropriate, so we immediately logged into Litmus and pulled up the Grafana summary dashboard that shows performance and availability from dozens of locations around the world.

I’ve been conducting a series of chats with UX professionals in the Open Source community with the intention of publishing their perspectives and methods. My first chat was with the UX Lead at a very popular config management company. Unfortunately, he never got back to me with approval, so I’ll refer to him as an anonymous source. I can say that the company described in this post is one I’ve admired for a long time, and has been doing exciting things for several years.

Torkel and the rest of the team have been hard at work on the next generation of Grafana, which is the foundation for what we’re building here at raintank. We’re really excited about the many new features and capabilites that Grafana 2.0 brings to the table, but they all have big implications from a UI/UX perspective. Our first task at raintank in a post-capacity world was clear: make sure that new functionality didn’t negatively impact the UI/UX.