Grafana Labs Previews Future of Observability at ObservabilityCON 2021

Published: 9 Nov 2021
Grafana Labs newsroom Press releases Grafana Labs previews future at ObservabilityCON 2021

11,000 virtual attendees get a first peek at advancements in tracing, on-call management, load testing, horizontal scaling, and more.

NEW YORK, November 9, 2021 - Grafana Labs, the company behind the world’s most ubiquitous open and composable operational dashboards, today announced major additions to the leading observability stack at the virtual ObservabilityCON 2021, including Grafana OnCall for on-call management and Grafana Enterprise Traces.

ObservabilityCON enters its second year as the premier 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. This year, more than 11,000 registrants will have the opportunity to hear from open source observability experts at Vonage and Network to Code, Grafana Labs customers Dell Technologies, JPMorgan Chase, and more — as well as the maintainers of Grafana, Prometheus, Grafana Loki, and Grafana Tempo. 

“With new product introductions and significant updates to both our open source and commercial offerings, key partnerships, acquisitions, and our Series C fundraising round in August, 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. “Along with many new open source enhancements, Grafana Enterprise Traces and Grafana OnCall are the latest product innovations providing immense value to our users around the globe.”

Grafana OnCall

Born from Grafana Labs’ recent acquisition of Amixr (surprise!), Grafana OnCall is an easy-to-use 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 new tool, teams will no longer have to manage separate alerts from Grafana, Prometheus, and Alertmanager, lowering the risk of missing an important update while also limiting the time spent receiving and responding to notifications.

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 customizable escalation policies, a Google Calendar-based workflow, integration with Slack, automated grouping, and more. 

Grafana OnCall is available in a preview beta for Grafana Cloud users on both the free and paid plans, with general availability expected in early 2022.

Grafana Enterprise Traces

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.

Powered by Grafana Tempo, which became generally available earlier this year at GrafanaCONline 2021, Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET) is built on an approach to trace indexing, storage, and administration control that allows companies to run it securely and at scale. All users within an organization are able to access their relevant trace data, and administrators can leverage the built-in Grafana interface to manage permissions and settings and grant individuals role-based access to the resources they need most — without compromising cost.

Additionally, with Grafana Enterprise Stack, teams get access to support, training, and consulting provided by the Grafana Labs team, including the creators and maintainers of Tempo, Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, and Cortex.

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.

But wait, there’s more…

  • Recorded queries: This new capability exports the results of certain non-time series queries to the Enterprise backend, in order to store data over time and allow customers to construct their own time series. This helps users get value from the Enterprise Stack beyond the data sources themselves.
  • Cardinality analysis: A set of pre-built dashboards that enable users to quickly drill into their Prometheus metrics data so they can answer questions to optimize cardinality and costs.
  • AWS CloudWatch integration: With just a few simple clicks, users can get their AWS CloudWatch metrics directly within Grafana Cloud, accessing pre-built dashboards, alerts, and queries at no extra cost.
  • Kubernetes monitoring improvements: First released earlier in 2021, Grafana’s solution is focused on making it simple to monitor your Kubernetes cluster and all of the applications and services within.
  • k6 capability updates: Following the June 2021 acquisition of k6 by Grafana Labs, new versions of the open source load testing tool will showcase its flexibility and help customers improve application performance, reliability, and stability.

To learn more about these and other announcements from ObservabilityCON 2021, register for free at https://grafana.com/about/events/observabilitycon/2021/ or visit the Grafana Labs blog at https://grafana.com/blog/. 

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs provides an open and composable monitoring and observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. There are 5,000+ Grafana Labs customers, including Bloomberg, Citigroup, Dell Technologies, Salesforce, and TomTom, and 25M+ Grafana users around the world. Grafana Labs helps companies achieve their observability goals with the LGTM Stack, which features scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo) as well as extensive enterprise data source plugins, dashboard management, alerting, reporting, and security. The fully managed Grafana Cloud offering is designed to help organizations get observability up and running easier and faster, with turnkey solutions for Kubernetes and infrastructure monitoring, incident response management, load testing, application observability, and more. Grafana Labs is backed by leading investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital, GIC, Sequoia Capital, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, and CapitalG. Follow Grafana Labs on LinkedIn and Twitter or visit grafana.com.

Press Contact: 

Alexa Becker
alexa.becker@grafana.com