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Grafana Labs works everyday to break traditional data boundaries with metric-visualization tools accessible across entire organizations. It began as a pure open-source project and has since expanded into supported subscription services. The Grafana open-source project is a platform for monitoring and analyzing time series data. There are also subscription offerings such as the supported Grafana Enterprise version. Grafana Labs’ engineers service more than 150,000 active installations. Users include companies such as PayPal, eBay and Booking.

Variables in Grafana (previously known as templates) allow parameterisation of a dashboard via a drop-down menu. Often this is used to switch between machines or services, so that you can have per-machine dashboards without needing to create a dashboard every time a new machine appears. They’re also stored in URL parameters, so could be linked from alert notifications or wiki pages. Source: robustperception.io

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU last week, Grafana Labs VP Product Tom Wilkie and Red Hat Software Engineer Frederic Branczyk, gave a keynote presentation about the future of observability and how this trifecta will evolve in 2019 and the years to come. Source: grafana.com

Grafana v6.0 brings many new and exciting features and enhancements and at the same time includes a new React platform and architecture for panels & plugins that will fundamentally change Grafana’s future as a platform. Grafana’s dashboard UI is all about building dashboards for visualization. Explore strips away all the dashboard and panel options so that you can focus on the query & metric exploration. Iterate until you have a working query and then think about building a dashboard.

Grafana is the defacto dashboarding solution for time-series data. It supports over 40 datasources (as of this writing), and the dashboarding story has matured considerably with new features, including the addition of teams and folders. We now want to move on from being a dashboarding solution to being an observability platform, to be the go-to place when you need to debug systems on fire. Observability. There are a lot of definitions out there as to what that means.