Grafana Labs Strengthens Cloud Native Ecosystem with Major OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes Monitoring Updates

Published: 5 Nov 2024
Grafana Labs newsroom Press releases Grafana Labs Strengthens Cloud Native Ecosystem with Major OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes Monitoring Updates
Company unveils open source contributions and platform updates ahead of KubeCon 2024

KUBECON, SALT LAKE CITY, November 5, 2024 – Grafana Labs, the observability company behind the world’s most ubiquitous, open and composable operational dashboards, today is sharing substantial contributions it has made to the open source community to make it easier to use projects in the CNCF ecosystem, including OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, which continue to skyrocket in popularity. In addition, the company is unveiling new features tailored for Kubernetes platform teams using Grafana Cloud.

These announcements come in advance of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, the industry’s largest open source conference dedicated to Kubernetes, Prometheus, and other cloud native technologies, taking place November 12-15 in Salt Lake City, Utah. These new developments will be featured at the Grafana Labs KubeCon booth (#R7).

Strengthening Our Commitment to Open Source Innovation and Interoperability

According to Grafana Labs’ 2024 Observability Survey, the vast majority of respondents are adopting multiple observability solutions, with 89% investing in Prometheus and 85% in OpenTelemetry – and 40% using both. Grafana Labs is one of the only companies serving as a leading contributor to both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, and its engineers have played a pivotal role in the advancement and adoption of these projects. The team has championed major features to enhance interoperability between the technologies, including driving OpenTelemetry compatibility in the newly released Prometheus 3.0, which was previewed by Arve Knudsen and Jesús Vázquez, Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineers and Prometheus maintainers, at PromCon 2024.

“As the cloud native ecosystem develops, we see firsthand how our ‘big tent’ approach drives innovation, which is a philosophy we embrace at Grafana Labs. Organizations aren’t choosing between OpenTelemetry and Prometheus – they’re using both, alongside many other tools, to solve real problems,” said Tom Wilkie, CTO, Grafana Labs. “At Grafana Labs, we embrace this diversity of technologies. We’re one of the biggest contributors to the Prometheus project, have a supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry distributor called Grafana Alloy, and build solutions like the OpenTelemetry Datadog Receiver to reflect this philosophy: We’re building bridges between different observability approaches, contributing upstream to multiple open source communities, and ensuring teams can use the right tool for the right job. This is how open source should work – inclusive, interoperable, and focused on solving real user needs.”

With the continued growth and adoption of these foundational open source projects, Grafana Labs engineers remain focused on making them easier to use, including:

  • Grafana Alloy: At GrafanaCON earlier this year, Grafana Labs introduced Grafana Alloy, a distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector that is 100% OTLP compatible and offers native pipelines for both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry formats, supporting metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. It’s vendor-agnostic by design and compatible anywhere the OpenTelemetry Collector or Prometheus Agent is used while also being flexible enough to cater to different users, large and small, at any phase of their observability journey. Grafana Alloy 1.3 was recently released, including enhanced debugging capabilities. This new feature provides real-time data monitoring to help visualize data transformations, identify and isolate errors, and analyze pipeline behavior.
  • OpenTelemetry Datadog receiver: In June, Grafana Labs engineers released new open source code that allows users to translate Datadog metric formats into native OTLP format. These metrics that are collected and translated by the OpenTelemetry Datadog receiver can be sent to any OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics system, whether it is Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, or another backend database. The receiver, marked as experimental, is available as both a Grafana Alloy and OpenTelemetry component.
  • Queryless metrics exploration with OpenTelemetry: Introduced earlier this year, Explore Metrics provides a no-code experience for browsing and analyzing Prometheus-compatible metrics without needing to write PromQL queries. Now, Explore Metrics is expanding to automatically handle OpenTelemetry metrics, eliminating the need for users to create separate queries for each system. This unified approach means users can access and visualize more types of metrics through a single, consistent interface regardless of whether the data is in Prometheus or OpenTelemetry format. The feature is available by default in Grafana and can be turned off if there are edge cases. This development represents Grafana Labs’ larger commitment to improving compatibility between OpenTelemetry and Prometheus while meeting users where they are no matter what formats they use.

Grafana Cloud Expands Kubernetes Monitoring Capabilities

Kubernetes Monitoring is a solution for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting within the fully managed Grafana Cloud observability platform. It provides a single pane of glass across your Kubernetes infrastructure, offering out-of-the-box visualizations of user data, cost monitoring insights, preconfigured alerts, alert rules, recording rules, and AI/ML predictions to simplify tasks that have been historically complex and time-consuming to achieve with just kubectl.

The solution’s real-time visibility, alerting, and troubleshooting capabilities for Kubernetes environments help organizations like Beeswax efficiently manage and optimize their container-based infrastructure. James Wojewoda, Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Beeswax, said, “Kubernetes Monitoring on Grafana Cloud enables our engineers to have native monitoring. No longer do they have to reach out to our SRE team. Instead, they just click a button on the Grafana Cloud integrations tab, navigate to the out-of-the-box dashboard, and see all the information — CPU usage, logs, metrics — they need to solve the problem themselves. It’s so simple, helps us spot issues fast, and saves us all a lot of custom development time.”

Over the past six months, Grafana Labs has continued to roll out a range of new developments to the solution. The latest updates include:

  • Contextual root cause analysis for Kubernetes-based applications: At ObservabilityCON in September, Grafana Labs announced a suite of contextual root cause analysis workflows in Grafana Cloud. These workflows leverage AI/ML to automate root cause analysis in users’ Kubernetes environments, simplifying troubleshooting and reducing MTTR. Historically, diagnosing issues in complex Kubernetes-based applications has been a time-consuming task, requiring manual correlation of data from both application and infrastructure layers. By automatically identifying and correlating anomalies across these layers, this technology provides teams with contextualized insights, enabling faster and more accurate issue resolution.
  • Availability in AWS Marketplace: Kubernetes Monitoring is now available in AWS Marketplace. Now, AWS users can easily deploy the solution with a single step in the AWS console or through the AWS Command Line Interface.
  • Improved operational monitoring with Sift investigations: Kubernetes Monitoring also streamlines operational monitoring with Sift investigations by instantly identifying critical deployment issues. The platform’s intelligent alerting system automatically detects deployments with insufficient ready replicas and quickly pinpoints problematic deployments and pods requiring restart. This enhanced visibility not only reduces MTTR but also significantly improves overall system reliability.
  • Enhanced historical visibility: While traditional kubectl commands offer limited historical data retention and require manual intervention, Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud provides automatic, comprehensive historical tracking of pods, nodes, and clusters—even after deletion or recreation. This enables SREs to efficiently troubleshoot post-deployment issues, optimize resource allocation, and conduct thorough incident analyses without the complexity of maintaining additional infrastructure or orchestrating multiple tools.
  • Troubleshooting enhancements: Kubernetes Monitoring has added more troubleshooting tools to help users easily find deleted objects, zoom in on a graph to narrow a time range for more analysis, and jump directly to Clusters, Nodes, and workloads directly from the homepage.
  • New views: One of the most popular features within Kubernetes Monitoring, cost monitoring, now provides a 90-day view of total compute cost, average cost per Pod, and average Pod count in the Cost overview tab. In addition, Kubernetes Monitoring now allows users to view energy data for their Kubernetes infrastructure components.

In addition, Grafana Labs continues to lean into its big tent philosophy while strengthening its commitment to the open source Kubernetes community by leading the development of the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart—a powerful open source solution for collecting comprehensive telemetry data from Kubernetes clusters. The chart enables the collection of metrics, logs, traces, and profiles, with capabilities for local processing and flexible data routing to the backend database of your choosing. While optimized for Grafana Cloud, it integrates seamlessly with open source databases including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, and more. The upcoming 2.0 release will bring many improvements including the ability to send data to multiple destinations, built-in service integrations, and a simplified configuration experience.

Resources

Those attending KubeCon in person can hear more about Grafana Labs’ products and open source contributions during the following sessions featuring Grafana Labs engineers:

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