Planet-scale dashboards at Google with Grafana

Google runs hundreds of thousands of services globally, often interdependent and with shared telemetry. At that scale, classic federated observability—a platform team providing foundations and/or building blocks for each team to assemble on their own—does not work anymore.

In this talk, Katia Giarda, Software Reliability Manager at Google, and Carl Bergquist, Principal Engineer at Grafana Labs, demonstrate how Google managed to cut toil dramatically while providing best-in-class monitoring out of the box. 

The presentation covers:

• The unique circumstances that contribute to Google’s scaling problems
• A data model for re-usable dashboards
• Impact on both configuration overhead and incident response
• Looking beyond dashboards, how such re-use can be facilitated in the broader observability space

Katia draws on Google’s research paper on planet-scale dashboards (to be published) and more than a decade of experience in SRE. Carl demos how Grafana has incorporated these ideas to enable Google to replace its existing dashboarding tool with Grafana.