Staying Busy Between Code Pushes

Staying Busy Between Code Pushes.

Maintaining a regular cadence of pushing out releases, adding new features, implementing bug fixes and staying on top of support requests is important for any software to thrive; but especially important for open source software due to its rapid pace. It’s easy to lose yourself in code and forget that events are happening all the time – in every corner of the world, where we can learn, share knowledge, and meet like-minded individuals to build better software, together. There are so many amazing events we’d like to participate in, but there simply isn’t enough time (or budget) to fit them all in. Here’s what we’ve been up to recently; between code pushes.

Recent Events

Øredev Conference | Malmö, Sweden: Øredev is one of the biggest developer conferences in Scandinavia, and Grafana Labs jumped at the chance to be a part of it. In early November, Grafana Labs Principal Developer, Carl Bergquist, gave a great talk on “Monitoring for Everyone”, which discussed the concepts of monitoring and why everyone should care, different ways to monitor your systems, extending your monitoring to containers and microservices, and finally what to monitor and alert on. Watch the video of his talk below.

InfluxDays | San Francisco, CA: Dan Cech, our Director of Platform Services, spoke at InfluxDays in San Francisco on Nov 14, and Grafana Labs sponsored the event. InfluxDB is a popular data source for Grafana, so we wanted to connect to the InfluxDB community and show them how to get the most out of their data. Dan discussed building dashboards, choosing the best panels for your data, setting up alerting in Grafana and a few sneak peeks of the upcoming Grafana 5.0. The video of his talk is forthcoming, but Dan has made his presentation available.

PromCon | Munich, Germany: PromCon is the Prometheus-focused event of the year. In August, Carl Bergquist, had the opportunity to speak at PromCon and take a deep dive into Grafana and Prometheus. Many attendees at PromCon were already familiar with Grafana, since it’s the default dashboard tool for Prometheus, but Carl had a trove of tricks and optimizations to share. He also went over some major changes and what we’re currently working on.

**[CNCF Meetup | New York, NY](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cloud-native-in-the-datacenter-why-how-and-who-tickets-38444092315#):** Grafana Co-founder and CEO, Raj Dutt, particpated in a panel discussion with the folks of Packet and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The discussion focused on the success stories, failures, rationales and in-the-trenches challenges when running cloud native in private or non “public cloud” datacenters (bare metal, colocation, private clouds, special hardware or networking setups, compliance and security-focused deployments).

Percona Live | Dublin: Daniel Lee traveled to Dublin, Ireland this fall to present at the database conference Percona Live. There he showed the new native MySQL support, along with a number of upcoming features in Grafana 5.0. His presentation is available to download.

Big Monitoring Meetup | St. Petersburg, Russian Federation: Alexander Zobnin, our developer located in Russia, is the primary maintainer of our popular Zabbix plugin. He attended the Big Monitoring Meetup to discuss monitoring, Grafana dashboards and democratizing metrics.

Why observability matters - now and in the future | Webinar: Our own Carl Bergquist and Neil Gehani, Director of Product at Weaveworks, to discover best practices on how to get started with monitoring both your application and infrastructure. Start capturing metrics that matter, aggregate and visualize them in a useful way that allows for identifying bottlenecks and proactively preventing incidents. View Carl’s presentation.

Upcoming Events

We’re going to maintain this momentum with a number of upcoming events, and hope you can join us.

GrafanaCon EU

Last, but certainly not least, the next GrafanaCon is right around the corner. GrafanaCon EU (to be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, March 1-2. 2018),is a two-day event with talks centered around Grafana and the surrounding ecosystem. In addition to the latest features and functionality of Grafana, you can expect to see and hear from members of the monitoring community like Graphite, Prometheus, InfluxData, Elasticsearch Kubernetes, and more. Head to grafanacon.org to see the latest speakers confirmed. We have speakers from Automattic, Bloomberg, CERN, Fastly, Tinder and more!

Conclusion

The Grafana Labs team is spread across the globe. Having a “post-geographic” company structure give us the opportunity to take part in events wherever they may be held in the world. As our team continues to grow, we hope to take part in even more events, and hope you can find the time to join us.