GrafanaCONline 2022 Day 4 recap: Grafana Labs technical docs, citizen science with Grafana Cloud, load testing with Grafana k6, and more
GrafanaCONline 2022 wrapped up on Friday, and the big finish featured sessions that covered important changes in Grafana Labs technical documentation, Grafana Cloud’s role in activist engineering projects, and the benefits of load testing with k6. There was also a great success story out of East Africa, where a major bank switched to a business monitoring system with Grafana and improved its customer satisfaction and revenue.
We’d like to thank all of our participants and everyone who tuned into the presentations across the four-day event. Were you unable to make it? Here’s some good news: You can still sign up to get notified about on-demand access to all our session recordings, which will be available starting tomorrow, Tuesday, June 21.
If you didn’t get a chance to watch Day 4 of GrafanaCONline 2022, here’s what you missed. (And if you aren’t caught up on all of the highlights, we’ve included a few notable sessions from other days, too.)
What’s up, Docs? A look at the new and improved Grafana Labs technical documentation
Grafana Labs’ technical writing team has spent much of the past year improving documentation across the company. Three of the team’s members — Fiona Peers Artiaga, Jack Baldry, and Eve Meelan — discussed development and feedback channels as well as tools and resources for the community. They also talked about how you can provide feedback to help us improve the docs. After all, a rich set of documentation is crucial to the success of a project.
Sign up for on demand access.
Inspiring activist engineering to improve global air quality with citizen science and Grafana Cloud
DesignSpark, a brand of the well-known RS Components Group, is a global platform for design engineers with 1.2 million members. Through its Activist Engineering program, DesignSpark aims to help educate, influence, promote, and enable design engineers to think and design more sustainably.
In this session, Pete Wood, head of DesignSpark Experience, discussed the brand’s air quality project, which revolves around an open source sensor kit (based on a Raspberry Pi) that people can use to monitor particulates, volatile air compounds, and carbon dioxide, then try to solve problems they discover. He highlighted the cool ways some pro makers/design engineers are using the kits, and explained why DesignSpark is relying on Grafana Cloud to collect, visualize, and share data from the project. Among the reasons: the quick setup, low cost, time series databases, and a desire for “really awesome” dashboards.
Grafana k6: Testing without limits
These days, as software becomes more distributed and complex, performance testing is happening earlier in the development lifecycle. That means developers and test engineers must have the ability to quickly incorporate automated tests right into their workflows.
Grafana Labs’ Developer Advocates Paul Balogh and Nicole van der Hoeven used this talk to provide an overview of the extensibility provided by the load testing tool Grafana k6. It has an ecosystem of more than 50 extensions, including ones that set up environments for applications deployed in Kubernetes; do specialized load testing to evaluate backend databases; simulate load by publishing events to Kafka or queue-based systems; and publish load-testing metrics to various observability platforms. The pair included a demonstration of a couple of the extensions to show just how easy it is to extend k6 for your own needs.
With Grafana, KCB Bank Uganda improved service uptime and has the tools to scale
Back in 2019, KCB Bank Uganda — a large bank in East Africa — migrated its transaction systems from a data center in Nairobi, Kenya, to one in Kampala, Uganda. The goal of the change was to improve systems reliability, resolve issues faster, and comply with new regulations.
In this talk, KCB’s Systems and Software Engineer Fauzi Lutaaya walked through how the bank went from monitoring its systems in a spreadsheet (obviously not ideal for accurately reporting on service status or detecting service downtime), to developing a monitoring tool from scratch (it only ended up covering 55% of what was necessary), to adopting state-of-the-art capabilities with Grafana. He discussed some of the key features they set up in Grafana, such as early warning dashboards and alerts. As a result, the bank now has a 96% improvement in transaction service monitoring, consistent service uptime, and increased revenue. Lutaaya said the bank is now prepared to scale as needed and extend Grafana to new hosts and services.
Sign up for on demand access.
Be sure to check out these other great GrafanaCONline 2022 sessions:
How Apeel Sciences uses Grafana to optimize its treatment processes and reduce food waste
The ag-tech company Apeel Sciences’ mission is to work with nature to reduce food waste and create abundance for all. It has a family of plant-derived coatings for fresh fruits and vegetables that helps to reinforce the peel and slow down spoilage. In this session, you’ll find out how the company leverages Grafana’s low-code platform to monitor their food treatment processes around the world in real time and create collaboration across disparate operations teams.
Sign up for on demand access.
28,000 people, 2300 wireless access points, 650 network switches, and jumbo dashboards: How Grafana provides data visibility at Cisco Live
Each year, Cisco Live brings together over 28,000 attendees in the U.S. and 17,000 in Europe for a weeklong event that includes training, new product announcements, onsite labs, keynotes, partner product showcases, entertainment — and more than 2,300 wireless access points and 650 network switches.
In this talk, Cisco Distinguished Engineer and Network Operations Center (NOC) lead, Jason Davis, explained how the company uses Cisco’s commercial management products alongside open source solutions to collect network statistics and display interesting metrics about the conference — and how Grafana plays a significant role in visualizing telemetry and instrumentation across network, wireless, compute, storage, and attendee metrics.
Sign up for on demand access.
How Optum uses Grafana Enterprise for a top-to-bottom view of its healthcare website
The portal monitoring team at Optum has less than 3 seconds to load a page before losing customers on their healthcare website and taking a hit in their customer satisfaction score. In this presentation, Optum’s Mark Smith showed how his team uses Grafana Enterprise and a variety of Enterprise data source plugins (Datadog, New Relic, Elasticsearch, ServiceNow, Splunk, and more) for a project that looks at the website, starting with the user experience (page level) down to the infrastructure, and visualizes different performance metrics with Grafana.
Sign up for on-demand access.
Grafana Labs hackathon showcase: Doomfana, real-time drone tracking, and a panel plugin for geospatially aware data
Three Grafana Labs teams shared demos of their fantastic projects that came out of this year’s company-wide hackathons. Watch to learn about running Doom on Grafana (then bookmark this blog post); real-time drone tracking and management, leveraging Grafana Live; and a panel plugin for enriched, geospatially aware data.
Sign up for on-demand access.
On Medallia’s journey to centralized observability, Grafana dashboards united it all
The experience management company Medallia gains its insights by capturing feedback signals through different types of interactions: human, virtual, video, and social media. In this session, members of Medallia’s Performance & Observability Engineering (POE) team discussed the company’s decision to make Grafana (paired with Grafana Loki) its one user interface for observability and explained why it’s been so beneficial.
Sign up for on demand access.
Check out the full list of GrafanaCONline 2022 presentations here.
