Grafana beats banana skins to eye 'observability futures'
Grafana Labs wants to keep the banana factor down.
Modern enterprise IT systems need to avoid slip-ups i.e. there should be no banana skins out there for the progressive enterprise that wants to operate effectively for the short, medium and long term.
As such, the company is behind technology designed to deliver open and composable operational dashboards.
At its own virtual ObservabilityCON 2021 event, the firm showcased Grafana OnCall for on-call management and Grafana Enterprise Traces.
As ObservabilityCON enters its second year, this event is billed as a destination for the observability community to come together virtually and share their best practices and get a peek at new product and feature announcements from Grafana Labs.
Born from Grafana Labs’ acquisition of Amixr (quelle surprise!), Grafana OnCall is an on-call management tool available in Grafana Cloud, built to help DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams improve their collaboration and ultimately resolve incidents faster.
With this tool, teams will no longer have to manage separate alerts from Grafana, Prometheus, and Alertmanager, so in theory if not in practice… this lowers the risk of missing an important update while also limiting the time spent receiving and responding to notifications.
“With new product introductions and significant updates to both our open source and commercial offerings, key partnerships, acquisitions etc. it’s already been a momentous year for the team here at Grafana Labs, but we refuse to rest on our laurels. We remain intensely focused on building world-class visibility and observability tools for our customers,” said Raj Dutt, co-founder and CEO at Grafana Labs.
Grafana OnCall
OnCall is easily integrated into existing Grafana Cloud deployments, working with existing alerting sources and monitoring tools so that teams can get up and running quickly and easily. The platform includes key features such as customisable escalation policies, a Google Calendar-based workflow, integration with Slack, automated grouping, and more.
Grafana Enterprise Traces is the latest addition to the company’s self-managed observability offering, Grafana Enterprise Stack, joining Enterprise Metrics and Enterprise Logs. Grafana Enterprise Stack now enables users to seamlessly jump from metrics, logs and traces within Grafana.
Open source upgrades
Grafana Labs also announced core updates to the Loki and Tempo open source projects, adding some new features frequently requested by the community. Loki 2.4’s new three-service deployment model allows operators to set up a high-availability, scalable log cluster faster than ever before, with a particular focus on enabling non-Kubernetes setups.
In addition, Loki 2.4 includes support for out-of-order log lines, custom log retention policies per log stream and per tenant, and a deletion API that makes it easy to scrub log data. Tempo 1.2 adds service graphs and the ability to search recent traces.
Free image: Wikipedia
Grafana in motion