From a constellation of tools to a centralized observability stack: Planet’s journey with Grafana Cloud
Company: Planet Labs
Industry: Satellite Imagery & Earth Data Analytics
Planet Labs is a pioneering space company that operates hundreds of satellites, capturing images of the Earth multiple times daily. They process vast amounts of data to deliver actionable insights across various sectors, including agriculture and defense, with customers spanning multiple industries.
Challenge
Planet Labs faced significant tool sprawl with metrics dispersed across multiple platforms. The absence of unified service level objectives (SLOs) also made it challenging to maintain consistent operational oversight.
Goal
Planet sought to consolidate the “three pillars” of observability into a single cohesive user experience. Logs, metrics, and traces should be provided in a single view to minimize context switching and decrease toil when problems arise.
Solution
By transitioning to Grafana Cloud, Planet Labs streamlined its observability stack, moving from a fragmented system to a unified platform. A combined view of logs, metrics, and traces reduces friction during troubleshooting and performance monitoring. Grafana Cloud’s ability to leverage logs for ad-hoc metrics, with the progression to recording rules for longer time scales, has enhanced Planet Labs’ operational efficiency. Standard query languages have lowered barriers to entry, supporting the growth of their software organization. Planet Labs has also benefited from close collaboration with Grafana Labs’ product and engineering teams, ensuring their needs are met as they continue to scale. Additionally, Grafana Labs’ commitment to open source and their “big tent” mindset has aligned well with Planet Labs’ values, fostering a community-driven approach to innovation.
Impact
- Improved efficiency: Grafana Cloud significantly reduced the time spent managing and correlating data from various observability tools.
- Enhanced performance: The high-performance platform allows Planet Labs to build a robust observability framework, crucial for maintaining their competitive edge in the space industry.
- Increased reliability: With Grafana Cloud and Grafana Labs’ support team, the engineering team can proactively address potential issues, ensuring smoother operations and greater confidence in meeting public company standards.
“Grafana Cloud significantly improved my team’s ability to observe and triage the systems we own. We’ve been able to greatly decrease fragmentation in observability tooling, and achieve consistency in how we monitor and alert on key signals across our systems. Being able to easily triage issues across metrics, logs, and traces has helped us improve system performance as well as increase operator confidence when on call. It has also equipped us to quickly sketch out dashboards or queries which answer product questions, leading to better understanding of not only how our systems perform but how users are interacting with them.”
Jacob Straszynski, Staff Software Engineer
What’s next
Planet Labs is exploring several new tools to further enhance their observability and operational efficiency. They are considering Grafana k6 for load and acceptance testing, as well as Grafana Pyroscope for profiling and tracing. Additionally, Planet Labs is evaluating Grafana Incident to replace PagerDuty and benefit from tighter integrations for streamlined incident management. Lastly, they are looking into implementing the Grafana SLO framework to drive cross-team alignment and accountability through agreed service contracts.
Conclusion
Grafana Cloud offered Planet Labs a cutting-edge observability solution that supports innovation while ensuring reliability. The move not only addressed immediate operational challenges, but also positioned Planet Labs for long-term success in delivering critical insights to their diverse customer base.
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