Help build the future of open source observability software Open positions

Check out the open source projects we support Downloads

Grot cannot remember your choice unless you click the consent notice at the bottom.

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 60

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 60

September 14, 2018 7 min

Welcome to TimeShift

This week we’re sharing articles on monitoring mixins, cloud native monitoring, monitoring your microservices, and a unique way to know when your software license is going to expire. See something we missed? Know of an article that might be a good fit for an upcoming issue? Contact us!


Latest Stable Release: Grafana 5.2.4

Bug Fixes
  • GrafanaCli: Fixed issue with grafana-cli install plugin resulting in corrupt http response from source error. Fixes #13079

See everything new in Grafana v5.2.4.

Download Grafana 5.2.4 Now


Latest Beta Release: Grafana 5.3.0beta-1

Major New Features
  • Alerting: Notification reminders #7330, thx jbaublitz
  • Dashboard: TV & Kiosk mode changes, new cycle view mode button in dashboard toolbar #13025
  • OAuth: Gitlab OAuth with support for filter by groups #5623, thx BenoitKnecht
  • Postgres: Graphical query builder #10095, thx svenklemm

There are a lot of other new features and fixes including the grafana-cli fix included in 5.2.4, so please check out the release notes to see everything that's new in Grafana 5.3.0beta-1.

Download Grafana 5.3.0beta-1 Now


GrafanaCon LA
CFP Now Open!

Join us in Los Angeles, California February 25-26, 2019 for 2 days of talks focused on Grafana and the open source monitoring ecosystem.

Submit You CFP Today


From the Blogosphere

Everything You Need to Know About Monitoring Mixins: In this recap from the most recent PromCon in Munich, Tom Wilkie dives into monitoring mixins – a solution for packaging together templates for Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alerts related to a specific piece of software. In addition to the recap, we’ve included the video demo and his presentation slides.

Reporting End of License on Temp Products with Chocolatey, Python, Telegraf and Grafana: Fabien walks us through how he uses Grafana alerts to let him know when his software licenses are about to expire.

IoT / SmartHome - Send EnOcean Sensor Data to Kafka: This article walks you through the steps to get your IoT sensor data visualized in Grafana. An EnOcean sensor will send data to Jeedom, which will feed a MQTT broker and then a synchronizer will send each received message to a Kafka topic. Then the latest value will be exposed to Prometheus and displayed on a Grafana dashboard.

Cloud Native Monitoring and Visualization with Prometheus and Grafana: A brief article on setting up a cloud native monitoring solution. Learn the basics of monitoring and observability, and get familiar with Prometheus and Grafana to make use of them in your Kubernetes environment.

Go Microservices Blog Series, Part 15 - Monitoring with Prometheus.: Part 15 in the Go Microservices blog series tackles monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana. You’ll learn about service discovery, adding endpoints, setting up the stack, and see some example queries to get you going.

Helm Chart Exporter: Ever wanted to know what versions of software are running on your Kubernetes cluster? Now, assuming you’re using Helm to install everything, you can.



Grafana Plugin Update

We have four plugin updates to share this week. Updating Grafana plugins is easy – for on-prem Grafana, use the grafana-cli tool, or for Hosted Grafana update with one-click at grafana.com.

UPDATED PLUGIN

USGS Water Services Data Source - The most important change is that USGS moved their service URL and this now avoids the 301 error. Also, this now nicely picks the mean daily value when you zoom out the instantaneous service to a large time window.

Install

UPDATED PLUGIN

Clickhouse Data Source - Updates to Clickhouse Data Source 1.7 include:

  • Provide $adhoc macros for using ad-hoc filters in inner queries (thx to @vavrusa)
  • Allow to set custom query for ad-hoc filter via adhoc_query_filter variable
  • Provide new Round value $step for auto-rounding according to graph resolution changes

Install

UPDATED PLUGIN

Akumuli Data Source - Minor bug fixed in the latest issue. Limit on number of returned data-points was set using the maxDataPoints value. That values was too small in some cases.

Install

UPDATED PLUGIN

Breadcrumb Panel - The Breadcrumb Panel received some minor style tweaks and fixed an issue with the display of the panel title.

Install



We're Hiring!

We've added new open positions at Grafana Labs! Do you love open source software? Do you thrive on tackling complex challenges to build the future? Want to work with awesome people? Be the next to join our team!

View our Open Positions



Upcoming Events

In between code pushes we like to speak at, sponsor and attend all kinds of conferences and meetups. We also like to make sure we mention other Grafana-related events happening all over the world. If you’re putting on just such an event, let us know and we’ll list it here.

Meetup Workshop: Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana | Belfast, Northern Ireland - September 18, 2018:
If you're in Belfast, or are going to be in September, this could be a great Meetup to attend. Topics include: Architecture, Prometheus, Alertmanager, Pushgateway, Telegraf, JMX exporter, Grafana, and more!

RSVP Now

Cloud Native Computing Stockholm | Stockholm, Sweden - September 25, 2018:
Torkel Ödegaard: What's Going On at Grafana - In this session Torkel will provide an update on the project and discuss what’s new/what's coming in the future. He'll also cover some “best practices/interesting things seen in the wild,” and save some time for Q&A.

RSVP Now

CloudNative London 2018 | London, United Kingdom - September 26-28, 2018:
Tom Wilkie: Monitoring Kubernetes With Prometheus – In this talk Tom will explore all the moving part for a working Prometheus-on-Kubernetes monitoring system, including kube-state-metrics, node-exporter, cAdvisor and Grafana. You will learn about the various methods for getting to a working setup: the manual approach, using CoreOS's Prometheus Operator, or using Prometheus Ksonnet Mixin.

Tom will also share some little tips and tricks for getting the most out of your [Prometheus](/oss/prometheus/) monitoring, including the common pitfalls and what you should be alerting on.

Register Now

All Things Open 2018 | Raleigh, NC - October 21-23, 2018:
Tom Wilkie: The RED Method - How to Instrument your Services – The RED Method defines three key metrics you should measure for every microservice in your architecture; inspired by the USE Method from Brendan Gregg, it gives developers a template for instrumenting their services and building dashboards in a consistent, repeatable fashion.

In this talk we will discuss patterns of application instrumentation, where and when they are applicable, and how they can be implemented with Prometheus. We'll cover Google's Four Golden Signals, the RED Method, the USE Method, and Dye Testing. We'll also discuss why consistency is an important approach for reducing cognitive load. Finally we'll talk about the limitations of these approaches and what can be done to overcome them.

Register Now

OSMC 2018 | Nuremberg, Germany - November 5-8, 2018:
David Kaltschmidt: Logging is Coming to Grafana – Grafana is an OSS dashboarding platform with a focus on visualizing time series data as beautiful graphs. Now we're adding support to show your logs inside Grafana as well. Adding support for log aggregation makes Grafana an even better tool for incident response: First, the metric graphs help in a visual zoning in on the issue. Then you can seamlessly switch over to view and search related log files, allowing you to better understand what your software was doing while the issue was occurring. The main part of this talk shows how to deploy the necessary parts for this integrated experience. In addition I'll show the latest features of Grafana both for creating dashboards and maintaining their configuration. The last 10-15 will be reserved for a Q&A.

Register Now



Tweet of the Week

We scour Twitter each week to find an interesting/beautiful dashboard or monitoring related tweet and show it off! #monitoringLove

Indeed! Be sure to checkout talks from the fine folks at FermiLab and CERN from previous GrafanaCons too.



How are we doing?

Hope you enjoyed this issue of TimeShift. What do you think? Are there other types of content you’d like to see here? Submit a comment on this issue below, or post something at our community forum.

Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and join the Grafana Labs community.