Grafana Labs Blog

This week we have updates and articles from the Grafana Labs team, some initial impressions on our Prometheus-inspired log aggregation project Loki, and lots more. Plus learn how to make your own air quality monitor.

This week we have a number of articles from the Grafana Labs blog we’d like to share, plus a new panel plugin and other updates. Also, take a look at our upcoming events. If you’re going to be attending any of them, please come and say hello!

TimeShift is back after a few weeks away with a lot of updates to share. GrafanaCon LA videos and presentations, details on Grafana v6.0.1, upcoming events we’ll be speaking at, and more!

This week we have a Loki presentation video from FOSDEM, using Grafana and Prometheus with Ansible, real-time heart monitoring during a presentation and info on GrafanaCon LA day 2 tracks and workshops.

This week we have a Loki presentation video from FOSDEM, using Grafana and Prometheus with Ansible, real-time heart monitoring during a presentation and info on GrafanaCon LA day 2 tracks and workshops.

Grafana v6.0 beta1, Updates to the lineup at GrafanCon, monitoring hybrid cloud environments, and monitoring the fastest Internet in the world.

Updates to the GrafanaCon LA speaker list and schedule, new features in the Azure Monitor Data Source, getting up and running with Grafana and Prometheus, plus learn how you can connect your Fitbit Blaze to Grafana.

News about the Azure Data Explorer plugin for Grafana, updates to the GrafanaCon LA speaker list, new functionality added to the polystat panel plugin and more.

Additions to the GrafanaCon LA speakers list, plugin updates and new plugins, monitoring Azure Log Analytics and more.

This week we share articles on the UX of Loki, visualizing pull request data from BitBucket, monitoring and observability predictions for 2019 and more!

Last issue of TimeShift for 2018. News on GrafanaCon LA day 2 workshops, Grafana Loki, and learn about Cortex: the platform that powers Grafana Cloud.

News on Grafana Loki, takeaways from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2018 and more!

Logging is coming to Grafana, Monitoring at Stack Overflow, Announcements from AWS re:Invent 2018 and more!

Logging is coming to Grafana, Monitoring at Stack Overflow, Announcements from AWS re:Invent 2018 and more!

This week we released Grafana v5.3.4 which includes an important security fix, plus new GrafanaCon speakers and 5 updated plugins.

Check out the slides from the 'Logging is coming to Grafana' presentation, get Grafana running in AWS OpsWorks, new and updated plugins and more.

This week we highlight Grafana project contributors from Hacktoberfest, share an article we published earlier this week on monitoring devices in your home with Prometheus and Grafana, how SoftwareMill manages their dashboards across environments and more.

Grafana v5.3.2, monitoring your AKS clusters, tracking your service availability and more.

This week we'll learn about the new Google Stackdriver core datasource in Grafana, dive into the new Postgres query editor and share some best practices. Also, GrafanaCon early bird tickets are going fast and we're closing the call for papers tonight (Oct 19).

Notes on the new Grafana v5.3 stable release, and description of new featues, an upcoming Graphite webinar you don't want to miss, and announcing the closing of GrafanaCon CFP.

Notes on the new 5.3.0beta-3 release, new and updated plugins, GrafanaCon early bird tickets and more. Also how to display metrics in OpenShift, gathering data from IoT devices, and an introduction to the pillars of observability.

How to get your company to send you to GrafanaCon, monitoring Kubernetes, automating your dashboards, and more.

Grafana's alpha Explore UI, the many ways Logicify uses Grafana, building a centralized monitoring stack to reduce context switching between other tools, and more.

Plugin updates and articles on monitoring mixins, cloud native monitoring, monitoring your microservices, and a unique way to know when your software license is going to expire.

Notes on the important security update for 5.2.3+ and 4.6.4, the new 5.2.4 stable release & 5.3.0-beta1, plus your weekly roundup of Grafana related articles from around the Web.

The ultimate guide to monitoring Kubernetes with Prometheus and Grafana, how to build effective dashboards, and a guide to help demystify PromQL.

A video demo of the new Explore UI in Grafana, monitoring VMWare's VKE with Prometheus, maintaining a blog on a budget and more.

PromCon presentations, monitoring CockroachDB, inside Fortnite's massive data analytics pipeline, Uber's M3 metrics platform and more!

GrafanaCon LA CFP announced, Monitoring using the RED Method, and a dashboard showing the heatwave that's slamming Europe.

Details on the new Grafana v5.2.2 release, notes on our new Flux data source plugin, and playing with weather APIs

2 brand-new plugins, plus a case study showing how PingCAP troubleshoots more than a thousand metrics from their TiDB clusters. Also, Tweet of the Week returns with a graph celebrating France's World Cup victory.

Articles on the world's fastest internet (with a shout out to Prometheus and Grafana), visualizing real-time and historic weather data, making teams more autonomous, and Grafana + Prometheus + Postgres + TimescaleDB.

With summer holidays approaching and upcoming vacations on the calendar, TimeShift is going to take next week off. We look forward to returning the week after next.

I really hope you've enjoyed reading these weekly roundups as much as I've enjoyed writing them. This week we have news on the new Grafana v5.2.0-beta3 release, a bunch of plugin updates to share, and your regular dose of recent blog posts.

This week's roundup highlights videos from Monitorama, making your own Grafana Plugins, NetApp's fully open source monitoring stack and more.

We were in Portland this week attending Monitorama - one of our favorite annual conferences. We got the chance to catch up with old friends, make some new ones, and be part of an amazing community of passionate data and monitoring aficionados.

We cover a lot of ground this week with posts on general monitoring principles, home automation, how CERN uses open source projects in their particle acceleration work, and more.

Welcome to TimeShift The day has finally arrived; GDPR is officially in effect! These new policies are meant to provide more transparency about the data companies collect on users, and how that data is used. I for one am just excited that the onslaught of "We’ve updated our privacy policy" emails arriving in my pummeled inbox is nearing its end. Grafana Labs is no exception. We encourage you to check out our privacy policy, and if you have any questions, feel free to contact us at privacy@grafana.

Welcome to TimeShift In addition to our weekly roundup of Grafana-related articles and upcoming events, we’re pleased to announce Grafana v5.1.3 has been released! Also - We’re hiring! Be sure to check out our open positions. Latest Release: Grafana 5.1.3 This latest point release fixes a scrolling issue that was reported in Firefox. In Graph panels, the legend text shifted with each move of the scrollbar (#11830). See what else is new in Grafana v5.

Welcome to TimeShift Grafana v5.1.2 is available and includes an important bug fix for MySQL, plus an update for GDPR compliance. See below for more details and the full release notes. Also, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 videos are now available including talks from members of the Grafana Labs team! Check out these talks below. If you would like your article highlighted in our weekly roundup, feel free to send me an email at hello@grafana.

Welcome to TimeShift Latest Release Grafana v5.1 stable is now available. See the full changelog for more details. Improved scrolling experience Improved docker image with a breaking change! Heatmap support for Prometheus Microsoft SQL Server as metric & table data source! Copy and paste for panels and other improvements when adding panels to dashboards Align Zero-Line for Right and Left Y-axes in the Graph Panel Check out the release blog post for an in-depth look at what's new.

Welcome to TimeShift Grafana v5.1 Stable is available! Two of the biggest new features include a native data source for MSSQL Server and heatmap support for Prometheus. Download the latest release and checkout other new features and fixes below. Heading to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 2-4? Come by our booth and say hi! Also don’t miss Tom Wilkie’s talk on Prometheus Monitoring Mixins: Using Jsonnet to Package Together Dashboards, Alerts and Exporters, and Goutham Veeramanchaneni’s talks: TSDB: The Engine behind Prometheus and TSDB: The Past, Present and the Future Latest Release We received a lot of great suggestions, bug reports and pull requests from our amazing community – Thank you all!

Welcome to TimeShift The big news this week is the release of Grafana v5.1.0-beta1. This beta release adds a number of features and enhancements including MSSQL support, additional alerting notification channels, improved dashboard provisioning functionality and some important UX fixes – most notably, the recently reported page scrolling issue. The Grafana Labs team will also hit the road for a few weeks starting with Percona Live in Santa Clara, CA, April 23-25 which we are speaking at and sponsoring, followed by KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 2-4, which we are also speaking at and sponsoring.

Welcome to TimeShift Spring has finally sprung in New York! Hope the weather is equally as beautiful in your part of the world. This week we have a few videos on Prometheus and Grafana to share, as well as articles on integrating Grafana with a new load testing tool, monitoring your AWS resources, and announcing a new Hashicorp Vault exporter for Prometheus. Also, we have a number of upcoming events we’ll be speaking at and sponsoring, so we hope we get to see you and say hi.

Welcome to TimeShift Welcome to another edition of timeShift. This week we have some plugin updates to share, as well as a dose of recent articles related to Grafana and the extended open source monitoring ecosystem. Be sure to check out all the talks from GrafanaCon. Follow us on Twitter and let us know which talk is your favorite. Latest Stable Release Grafana 5.0.4 is available for download. Bug fixes in the latest release include: Docker: Can’t start Grafana on Kubernetes 1.

Welcome to TimeShift We have an abridged version of timeShift this week due to the long holiday weekend. Earlier this week we released Grafana v5.0.4 which included fixes for alerting, snapshots, starting Grafana on K8s and more. See the section below for specific bug fixes. Enjoy this issue and we’ll see you next week! Latest Stable Release This week we rolled out Grafana 5.0.4. Bug fixes in the latest release include: Docker: Can’t start Grafana on Kubernetes 1.

Welcome to TimeShift I’m happy to announce that we have all of the talks from GrafanaCon EU available on our youtube channel! I will also be embedding these videos on the GrafanaCon page on our website, and will be adding links to all of the speaker’s slides for you to download as well. I’m also sorting through a few hundred photos from the event and will be setting up a gallery so you can see how much fun everyone has at GrafanaCon.

Welcome to TimeShift It’s great to be back after a few busy weeks off, and we have lots of updates and articles to share. During GrafanaCon EU 2018 in Amsterdam, we officially launched Grafana 5.0 stable! Despite the “Beast from the East” storm that blew through Europe and stranded two of our speakers, the conference was sold out and we’re extremely proud of the event. We’re taking suggestions for locations for our next GrafanaCon (think: someplace warm).

Welcome to TimeShift This week’s timeShift will be abridged, as we’re busy putting the final touches on GrafanaCon EU. As I write this, we have 3 Angel tickets remaining, surpassing a registered 350 attendees. 100% of proceeds from these angel tickets will go to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), a nonprofit who defends the rights of our digital privacy and free speech; a cause we’re very passionate about. You can snag these last tickets here.

Welcome to TimeShift The big news this week is that we’ve sold out of General Admission tickets for GrafanaCon EU! We would like to thank the Grafana community for all your support and enthusiasm around GrafanaCon and are looking forward to delivering a highly valuable, interesting and most of all, fun conference. There are a small amount of Angel Tickets available - don’t miss your last chance to join us in Amsterdam!

Welcome to TimeShift The big news this week of course, was the release of Grafana 5.0 beta. This is the largest Grafana release since the project's launch and we're extremely excited to receive feedback from the community. Some of the bigger features include teams, dashboard folders, and permissions, but we tried to look at even little things like cleaning up icons, taking a look at the default graph color palette, and reworking the light theme.

Welcome to TimeShift This week Grafana crossed 20,000 stars on Github! Big thanks to the Grafana community! We’re feverishly working on the upcoming Grafana 5.0 release scheduled to go out next week, and we’d like your feedback. Also - We have a busy week coming up with conferences and meetups we’re speaking at, starting with FOSDEM in Brussels, Feb 3-4 where Grafana creator Torkel Odegaard will be showing off what’s new in Grafana v5.

Welcome to TimeShift This is an event-heavy issue of TimeShift. We’ve been busy prepping for the Grafana v5 Beta release and finalizing details for our upcoming GrafanaCon. Below you’ll find a presenation on Prometheus monitoring, tracking a problematic ADSL connection and how to use Elasticsearch as a data source in Grafana. Enjoy! #### Latest Stable Release Grafana 4.6.3 is available. Check out the full release notes too see the features and fixes.

Welcome to TimeShift We’re only 6 weeks away from the next GrafanaCon and here at Grafana Labs we’re buzzing with excitement. We have some great talks lined up that you won’t want to miss. This week’s TimeShift covers Grafana’s annotation functionality, monitoring with Prometheus, integrating Grafana with NetFlow and a peek inside Stream’s monitoring stack. Enjoy! #### Latest Stable Release Grafana 4.6.3 is now available. Latest bugfixes include: Gzip: Fixes bug Gravatar images when gzip was enabled #5952 Alert list: Now shows alert state changes even after adding manual annotations on dashboard #99513 Alerting: Fixes bug where rules evaluated as firing when all conditions was false and using OR operator.

Welcome to TimeShift #### Latest Stable Release Grafana 4.6.3 is now available. Latest bugfixes include: Gzip: Fixes bug Gravatar images when gzip was enabled #5952 Alert list: Now shows alert state changes even after adding manual annotations on dashboard #99513 Alerting: Fixes bug where rules evaluated as firing when all conditions was false and using OR operator. #93183 Cloudwatch: CloudWatch no longer display metrics’ default alias #101514, thx @mtanda Download Grafana 4.

Happy new year! Grafana Labs is getting back in the swing of things after taking some time off to celebrate 2017, and spending time with family and friends. We’re diligently working on the new Grafana v5.0 release (planning v5.0 beta release by end of January), which includes a ton of new features, a new layout engine, and a polished UI. We’d love to hear your feedback! #### Latest Stable Release Grafana 4.

As we wrap up 2017, I wanted to kick off my last timeShift of the year to thank you, the Grafana community, for all your input, feedback, and involvement that's made Grafana better with every release. While code contributions are extremely important, they're not the only way to participate in the open source software community. Feature requests, bug reports, writing documentation, testing new features, participating in hackathons and meetups – all contribute to making open source projects better.

Welcome to TimeShift Big news this week: Grafana v5.0 has been merged into master and is available in the nightly builds! We are really excited to share this with the community, and look forward to receiving community feedback (good or bad) on the new features and enhancements. As you see in the video below, there are some big changes that aim to improve workflow, team organization, permissions, and overall user experience.

Welcome to TimeShift This week, a few of us from Grafana Labs, along with 4,000 of our closest friends, headed down to chilly Austin, TX for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017. We got to see a number of great talks and were thrilled to see Grafana make appearances in some of the presentations. We were also a sponsor of the conference and handed out a ton of swag (we overnighted some of our custom Grafana scarves, which came in handy for Thursday’s snow).

Welcome to TimeShift It’s hard to believe it’s already December. Here at Grafana Labs we’ve been spending a lot of time working on new features and enhancements for Grafana v5, and finalizing our selections for GrafanaCon EU. This week we have some interesting articles to share and a number of plugin updates. Enjoy! #### Latest Release Grafana 4.6.2 is now available and includes some bug fixes: Prometheus: Fixes bug with new Prometheus alerts in Grafana.

Welcome to TimeShift This week, Grafana Labs team members in the U.S. took time off for the Thanksgiving holiday, to spend time with family and friends. While I’m thankful for many things, I would like to call out two special groups - 1. My Grafana Labs family: you teach me something new every day, provide interesting challenges, and make our “post-geographic” company extremely collaborative. You make it a pleasure to come to work.

Welcome to TimeShift We hope you liked our recent article with videos and slides from the events we’ve participated in recently. With Thanksgiving right around the corner, we’re getting a breather from work-related travel, but only a short one. We have some events in the coming weeks, and of course are busy filling in the details for GrafanaCon EU. This week we have a lot of articles, videos and presentations to share, as well as some important plugin updates.

This week the Stockholm team was in Malmö, Sweden for Øredev – one of the biggest developer conferences in Scandinavia, while the rest of Grafana Labs had to live vicariously through Twitter posts. We also announced a collaboration with Microsoft's Azure team to create an official Azure data source plugin for Grafana. We've also announced the next block of speakers at GrafanaCon. Awesome week! Photos from Oredev #### Latest Release Grafana 4.

This week, in addition to rolling out a Grafana 4.6.1 release, we've been busy prepping for upcoming events. In Europe, we'll be speaking at and sponsoring the sold-out Øredev Conference in Malmö, Sweden, Nov 7-11, and on the west coast, we'll be speaking at and sponsoring InfluxDays, Nov 14 in San Francisco, CA. We hope to get a chance to say hi to you at one of these events. <p>We also closed the CFP window this week for talks at <a href="https://grafanacon.

This week, we were busy prepping for our latest stable release, Grafana 4.6! This is a sizeable release that adds some key new functionality, but there's no time to pat ourselves on the back - now it's time to focus on Grafana 5.0! In the meantime, find out more about what's in 4.6 in our release blog post, and let us know what you think of the new features and enhancements.

Welcome to another issue of timeShift. This week we released Grafana 4.6.0-beta2, which includes some fixes for alerts, annotations, the Cloudwatch data source, and a few panel updates. We're also gearing up for Oredev, one of the biggest tech conferences in Scandinavia, November 7-10. In addition to sponsoring, our very own Carl Bergquist will be presenting "Monitoring for everyone." Hope to see you there - swing by our booth and say hi!

It's been a busy week here at Grafana Labs. While we've been working on GrafanaCon EU preparations here at the NYC office, the Stockholm office has been diligently working to release Grafana 4.6-beta-1. We're really excited about this latest release and look forward to your feedback on the new features. #### Latest Release Grafana 4.6-beta-1 is now available! Grafana v4.6 brings many enhancements to Annotations, Cloudwatch and Prometheus.

Welcome to another issue of TimeShift. In addition to the roundup of articles and plugin updates, we had a big announcement this week - Early Bird tickets to GrafanaCon EU are now available! We're also accepting CFPs through the end of October, so if you have a topic in mind, don't wait until the last minute, please send it our way. Speakers who are selected will receive a comped ticket to the conference.

This week the Grafana Labs team converged on Stockholm. In addition to taking advantage of the beautiful weather, which was perfect for team outings, we were also hard at work setting objectives for the next Grafana release, finalizing details for GrafanaCon EU, and enjoying some good old-fashioned face time in an otherwise post-geographic company. This issue of TimeShift covers a few recent and upcoming talks, monitoring Kubernetes and plugin updates.

Summer is officially in the rear-view mirror, but we at Grafana Labs are excited. Next week, the team will gather in Stockholm, Sweden where we’ll be discussing Grafana 5.0, GrafanaCon EU and setting other goals. If you’re attending Percona Live Europe 2017 in Dublin, be sure and catch Grafana developer, Daniel Lee on Tuesday, September 26. He’ll be showing off the new MySQL data source and a sneak peek of Grafana 5.

It’s been a busy week here at Grafana Labs - Grafana 4.5 is now available! We’ve made a lot of enhancements and added new features in this release, so be sure and check out the release blog post to see the full changelog. The GrafanaCon EU CFP is officially open so please don’t forget to submit your topic. We’re looking for technical and non-technical talks of all sizes. #### Latest Release Grafana v4.

Welcome to another timeShift. This week, we highlight Prometheus and the videos from PromCon 2017 and have a bunch of plugin updates to show off. Also, don’t forget to submit your topic to speak at GrafanaCon EU, and check out the positions we’re looking to fill at Grafana Labs! #### Latest Release **Grafana v4.5.0-beta1 is** available for download. We have some exciting new features to share with you in this release, including: New Prometheus Query Editor with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and integrated function docs directly in the editor.

September is here and summer is officially drawing to a close, but the Grafana team has stayed busy. We’re prepping for an upcoming Grafana 4.5 release, had some new and updated plugins, and would like to thank two contributors for fixing a non-obvious bug. Also - The CFP for GrafanaCon EU is open, and we’d like you to speak! GrafanaCon EU CFP is Open Have a big idea to share?

This week, in addition to the articles we collected from around the web and a number of new Plugins and updates, we have a special announcement. GrafanaCon EU has been announced! Join us in Amsterdam March 1-2, 2018. The call for papers is officially open! We’ll keep you up to date as we fill in the details. Grafana <3 Prometheus Last week we mentioned that our colleague Carl Bergquist spoke at PromCon 2017 in Munich.

Many people decide to take time off in August to enjoy the nice weather before Fall, but I’ve been surprised at the number of Grafana related articles that I’ve come across this week. This issue of timeShift, contains articles covering weather tracking, home automation and a couple of updates to native Plugins from the core Grafana team. GrafanaCon EU Announced! GrafanaCon is a two-day event with talks centered around Grafana and the surrounding ecosystem.

Hard to believe it’s already August! This week there were a ton of articles to highlight. It’s really exciting to see how many data aficionados there are out there coming up with new ways to connect Grafana to their data, wherever it may live. In this issue we cover crypto currency visualization, home automation setups and breakdown the installation in a number of environments. Enjoy! GrafanaCon EU Announced! GrafanaCon is a two-day event with talks centered around Grafana and the surrounding ecosystem.

Welcome to another edition of timeShift! This week, in addition to the great articles we’ve found scouring the Internet, we have two new plugins to announce and updates to three data source plugins to add to our list of 80 plugins. Without any further ado, let’s dive in! #### From the Blogosphere - [**Hawkular Data Source: A New Query Interface for Grafana**](http://www.hawkular.org/blog/2017/07/grafana-new-query-interface.html): Our friends over at Hawkular have been busy making big updates to their [Hawkular Data Source Plugin](https://grafana.

We cover a lot of ground in this week’s timeShift. From diving into building your own plugin, finding the right dashboard, configuration options in the alerting feature, to monitoring your local weather, there’s something for everyone. Are you writing an article about Grafana, or have you come across an article you found interesting? Please get in touch, we’ll add it to our roundup. #### From the Blogosphere - [**Going open-source in monitoring, part III: 10 most useful Grafana dashboards to monitor Kubernetes and services**](https://medium.

The summer seems to be flying by! This week’s timeShift has a lot of great articles to share, including a Grafana presentation from one of our software engineers, Kubernetes monitoring, dashboard exports and backups via grafcli, scaling Graphite on AWS and a lot more. If you’ve come across a recent article about Grafana, or are writing one yourself, please get in touch, we’d be happy to feature it here. #### From the Blogosphere - [**Democratizing Metrics with Grafana**](https://speakerdeck.

Many in the US were on holiday for Independence Day earlier this week, but that didn’t slow us down: team Stockholm even shipped a new Grafana release. This issue of timeShift has plenty of great articles to highlight. If you know of a recent article about Grafana, or are writing one yourself, please get in touch, we’d be happy to feature it here. #### Grafana 4.4 Released Grafana v4.4 is now Available for download **Dashboard history and version control is here!

A big thank you to everyone for the likes, retweets, comments and questions from last week’s timeShift debut. We were delighted to learn that people found this new resource useful, and are excited to continue to publish weekly issues. If you know of a recent article about Grafana, or are writing one yourself, please get in touch, we’d be happy to feature it here. From the Blogosphere Monitoring a MariaDB server using Prometheus and Grafana: In this post Sameer outlines the process of adding a Prometheus endpoint to an existing chart (MariaDB in this case) and use Grafana to monitor the performance.

Introducing timeShift TimeShift is a new blog series we’ve created to provide a weekly curated list of links and articles centered around Grafana and the growing Grafana community. Each week we come across great articles from people who have written about how they are using Grafana, how to build effective dashboards, and a lot of discussion about the state of open source monitoring. We want to collect this information in one place and post an article every Friday afternoon highlighting some of this great content.

Tuesday, May 23 6-9pm - Grafana Labs & NS1 invite you to join us for a special Monitorama Afterparty on Tuesday after the talks conclude at Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade, just a short walk from the conference venue. We’re unlocking all of your favorite arcade games for free-play, and will provide refreshments, friendly competition and a chance to win a classic Mini Nintendo Entertainment System. Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade: 115 NW 5th Ave, Portland OR, 97209

I’ve been looking forward to writing about some of the more visual-design focused projects at raintank I’ve been working on for a while. Recently, I finished designing our company business cards, which I’m pretty excited about, so now feels like the right time. The Intersection of Data and Design Raintank is a very design-forward company. Everyone on the core team is passionate about clarity and distilling complex ideas into elegant simplicity.