GrafanaCONline 2022 Day 3 recap: Alerting in Grafana 9, Loki developments, dashing dashboards, and more!
GrafanaCONline 2022 is still going strong, with sessions that covered alerting in Grafana 9, developments in Grafana Loki, and some winning Loki use cases. Plus, there was a talk about building an a F1 telemetry analysis solution that uses Grafana Cloud, along with plenty of dashboard discussions.
You can tune into GrafanaCONline 2022 live (for free!) for today’s lineup of awesome speakers, or you can sign up to get notified about on-demand access to all our session recordings, which will be available after GrafanaCONline ends on June 17.
If you didn’t get a chance to watch Day 3 of GrafanaCONline 2022, here’s what you missed.
Alerting in Grafana 9: What’s new and improved
Grafana’s unified alerting offers some of the most powerful alerting capabilities available. A single, consistent alerting rule can generate multiple notifications, powered by Prometheus’s multi-dimensional, label-based data model.
In this session, Grafana Labs’ Farhan Manjiyani and Gilles De Meythe showcased some of the major improvements we’ve made to unified alerting for Grafana 9, such as expanding the ability to create alerts (Terraform, API, etc.) to make it easier to have alerts with multiple contact points and multiple data sources.
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How Grafana unified alerting powers Torqata’s data health scorecard system
The tire industry is fairly antiquated in terms of how it thinks about using data — and insights from data — to drive efficiency. As a result, there are issues with over- and under-production, product distribution, logistics, and more. Torqata, an analytics software company serving the tire and automotive industries, has set out to change that. The company’s goal is to ingest, process, and evaluate data from a large number of point-of-sale systems in order to provide SaaS solutions and analytics back to its partners in the industry.
A key part of Torqata’s work is being able to understand the health of its customers’ data, so the company needed a scalable, robust, and extensible “scorecard” system that could understand existing data feeds and discover new ones. In this presentation, Torqata CTO AJ Pryor and Lead Data Engineer Marie-Claire Kore discussed how unified alerts in Grafana have come to play a special role in Torqata’s automated customer onboarding scorecard. Thanks to Grafana, the company has been able to decrease onboarding time; provide a holistic view of data quality by customer, vendor, and application; and help quickly discover and target remediations of data quality issues. Pryor also highlighted the gotchas and best practices they’ve learned over the past year.
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Grafana Loki: The road to higher scales and lower latencies for logs
Over the past four year, Grafana Loki — “like Prometheus, but for logs” — has grown into its own, with many improvements to performance, ease of use, and interoperability with more log sources. In this session, Loki maintainers Owen Diehl and Cyril Tovena discussed some of the most important recent developments, including a new storage layer and storage schema, simple scalable deployment, and new ways to send logs to Loki from different sources. They even shared best practices for faster queries with LoqQL
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Monitoring battery-operated NBIoT sensors with Grafana and Grafana Loki
Athens-based Fuelics PC is a research and development company that manufactures, deploys, and operates installations of battery-operated, narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) sensors for industrial and Smart City applications. The company has developed devices for use cases that include tank level monitoring, water flow measurement, and parking space capacity.
In their presentation, Fuelics’ Head of Cloud & Platforms Ioannis Nikolaou and Operations Engineer Marios Klavdianos, went over the basics and benefits of a battery-operated, ultrasound NB-IoT sensor, and explained how data is transmitted from the edge to the cloud. The sensors collect critical data — device health (temperature and battery life), network status where the device is installed, and measurements from the sensors — that are needed for the observability of the devices. Nikolaou explained that they selected Grafana Loki as the core component for observability because they were looking for a way of collecting the information that was deployment-agnostic and also flexible enough to support business requirements. He then highlighted some of the features in Loki they have found most useful, such as parsing the logs for the sensors and adjusting timestamps. Klavdianos went on to share some of the company’s Grafana dashboards, which he called “a very useful way to frequently check the operational sensor measurement’s correctness, accuracy, and to generally monitor each sensor’s behavior.”
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UX best practices for a dashing dashboard
Joe Kim, Pauric O’Callaghan, and Leah Ujda from Grafana’s user experience team shared tips on how to use a few key UX research and design activities — including ones actually used in Grafana Labs’ own product design and development — that can help ensure you’re meeting your users’ needs and providing them with useful, delightful experiences.
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Formula 1 telemetry analysis with Microsoft Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and Grafana Cloud
Did you know that Formula 1 is one of the most data-driven sports? According to Anshul Sharma, a senior product manager at Microsoft working on Azure Data Explorer (ADX), every F1 car contains 300 sensors, which generate approximately 1.1 million telemetry data points per second. Every race weekend, about an estimated 160 terabytes of data is generated. That data is the best way for teams to understand not only how cars and drivers are performing, but it’s also how they analyze past races in order to continually improve.
In his presentation, Sharma explained how to select and set up a technology stack with ADX (a time series, interactive analytics platform supporting near-real-time streaming) and Grafana to monitor Formula 1 telemetry data from ingestion all the way to an engineer’s dashboard. He ran a demo using a racing video game to show what it looks like when race data is analyzed in near-real time data in Grafana and delved into why Grafana is ideal for a race engineer or team manager that needs to visualize the telemetry data. Sharma also showed off dashboard panels that keep track of the car, driver, race, and more. He ended with examples of other near-real time analytics use cases — such as retail, healthcare, and security — that would use a similar technology stack.
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On Medallia’s journey to centralized observability, Grafana dashboards united it all
Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in experience management. The company gains insights by capturing feedback signals through different types of interactions: human, virtual, video, and social media.
In recent years, as Medallia grew as a company and ingested more data, various engineering teams at the company built disparate solutions for pillars of observability. The result? Unnecessary chaos and complexity. In this session, members of Medallia’s Performance & Observability Engineering (POE) team — which was created in 2020 to get everything in order — discussed why they chose Grafana and Grafana Loki as the sole user interface for observability. Two key reasons were that the team was already using Grafana for metrics, and its familiarity with PromQL meant there was a minimal learning curve when it came to using LogQL. “Having the ability for metrics, logs, and traces to be on the same dashboard is the gold standard we were striving for,” David Howard, a senior manager at Medallia, said. “Loki for the win.” Now, their investigations are simplified, and it’s possible to deliver insights to engineering leadership that hadn’t been possible in the past.
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Don’t miss today’s GrafanaCONline 2022 sessions!
What’s up, Docs? A look at the new and improved Grafana Labs technical documentation
8:00 PDT, 17:00 CEST, 15:00 UTC
with Fiona Peers Artiaga, Jack Baldry, and Eve Meelan from Grafana Labs
Inspiring activist engineering to improve global air quality with citizen science and Grafana Cloud
8:30 PDT, 17:30 CEST, 15:30 UTC
with Pete Wood of DesignSpark Experience
Grafana k6: Testing without limits
9:00 PDT, 18:00 CEST, 16:00 UTC
with Paul Balogh and Nicole van der Hoeven of Grafana Labs
With Grafana, KCB Bank Uganda improved service uptime and has the tools to scale
9:30 PDT, 18:30 CEST, 16:30 UTC
with Fauzi Lutaaya of KCB Bank
Check out the full GrafanaCONline 2022 schedule here.
And don’t forget you can connect with the Grafana community and get the latest updates from the Grafana Labs team during the event on the Grafana Labs Community Slack. Join the #grafanacon channel.
