GrafanaCon L.A. Recap: Grafana 6.0, LGTM, and More!
The rest of the city may still have been in a post-Oscars haze, but over 350 monitoring mavens gathered in downtown L.A. bright and early on Feb. 25 to kick off GrafanaCon 2019. The next two days were filled with 40+ talks, including Grafana end user stories from companies like Bloomberg and Tinder. The second day’s schedule allowed attendees to choose from multiple deeper-dive tracks such as cloud native observability, real-time analytics in IoT, and Grafana itself (getting the most out of it and extending it).
Here are some highlights and takeaways from the conference:
Grafana v6.0 was launched. The release includes Explore, a new query-focused workflow for ad-hoc data exploration and troubleshooting; integration with Grafana Loki, the new open source log aggregation system; React plugin support to make building plugins easier; and support for all of the major public clouds’ monitoring stacks (Azure Monitor, Google Stackdriver, Amazon CloudWatch, Oracle Cloud monitoring). “The release has been a hit with users that love the new Explore mode and the new ability to switch visualizations,” says Grafana Labs CGO/Cofounder Torkel Ödegaard. “Personally, I am really excited about the path we are on with so much progress having been made on improving Grafana as a modern platform and how we will capitalize on that foundational work with an increased rate of new features and visualizations in the coming months.”
LGTM looks good to us. The Grafana Labs team unveiled their vision for LGTM, a full, composable observability stack: “It stands for Loki, Grafana, Tracing, and Metrics,” says Tom Wilkie, Grafana Labs VP Product, “but it’s also logging, graphing, tracing, and metrics, in any combination, as long as the G is for Grafana. As a company, we want to support all combinations of this to help our users to find the right technologies to fit.”
Interest in Kubernetes and Prometheus was sky-high. The cloud native observability track on the second day—which included sessions on visualizing chaos engineering experiments and treating dashboards as code—was “super well-attended, with really good quality questions, lots of real interest, and a great amount of energy,” reports Wilkie.
There was plenty of love for Graphite and MetricTank. Impressed by the high demand for Graphite and MetricTank content among conference attendees, Wilkie emphasizes that the project continues to be a large focus for Grafana Labs. “We’re still investing in that team and hiring new people to work on that team,” he says, “and we’ve got some really exciting stuff coming!”
Networking goes well with beer. The v6.0 launch party on the first night featured lots of craft beer and conversations late into the night. Above all, connecting with fellow travelers on the observability journey was a true highlight of the conference. See you next year!
Missed the conference? You can watch the talks here.
