Top 10 trending topics in the Grafana community
When community members share their Grafana story and best practices with others — whether they’re presenting at a meetup, writing a blog, or creating a video tutorial — it’s truly a win-win. It benefits the broader community through knowledge sharing, but also provides you with a platform to showcase your expertise — and could pave the way toward becoming a Grafana Champion.
But we know it can be a challenge to choose a particular topic to speak or write about. That’s why, with this post, we hope to provide a little inspiration by sharing some of the most popular topics within the Grafana community over the past year.
To compile the list below, we looked at the most commonly discussed topics across the Grafana community. This involved analyzing community data from Grafana.com, the Grafana Community Slack Workspace, our 50+ meetup groups, LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, Reddit, medium, X, and YouTube.
The topics on this list are fairly broad and evergreen. If you want to drill down and get more granular, you can find more details on each topic by searching our community forum. For each topic, we’ve also included links to related content, including blog posts, meetup talks, YouTube videos, and more.
Trending topics in the Grafana community
1. Dashboards and panels
Dashboards are Grafana’s bread and butter, and the community loves helpful posts about how others are using dashboards to visualize and gain value from their data. There’s also a lot of interest, specifically, related to panels, which are the basic visualization building blocks in Grafana. Each panel has a query editor (specific to the data source selected) that allows you to build a query to return the data you want to visualize. Grafana users are always eager to hear how fellow community members style and format their panels to create beautiful dashboards, as well as explore different panel types, such as stat and Canvas.
Content examples:
- A set of modern Grafana dashboards for Kubernetes
- Build a Website Analytics dashboard in Grafana | Step by step tutorial | Loki data source
- From ELK to Grafana Loki: How eCommerce leader Blinkit modernized their logging stack with Grafana Cloud
2. Alerts
With Grafana Alerting, you can create queries and expressions from multiple data sources — no matter where your data is stored — giving you the flexibility to combine your data and alert on your metrics and logs in new and unique ways. We’d love to hear how your team uses Grafana Alerting to quickly identify and resolve issues.
Content examples:
- Milliseconds matter: How Stack Overflow uses Grafana to optimize its systems
- How to create an alert in Grafana
3. Troubleshooting and errors
Troubleshooting is another important topic within the community. There are various methods and best practices to troubleshoot in Grafana, and there are also tools like the Errors page in Grafana Cloud to help users identify and troubleshoot issues with their applications.
Content examples:
- How to troubleshoot memory leaks in Go with Grafana Pyroscope
- How Grafana helps PingCAP troubleshoot TiDB deployments
4. Labels and queries in Grafana Loki
For users of Grafana Loki — the open source, horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system — labels and queries continue to be a popular topic. Labels are key value pairs and can be defined as anything; we like to refer to them as metadata to describe a log stream. Users can combine different labels to create flexible log queries.
Content examples:
5. Generative AI
These days, it seems like everybody is talking about generative AI — and the Grafana community is certainly no exception. At Grafana Labs, we’re building powerful generative AI features in a way that stays true to our big tent philosophy. We’d love to hear how you’re using, or experimenting with, generative AI to advance your observability journey.
Content examples:
- Lessons learned from integrating OpenAI into a Grafana data source
- Generative AI at Grafana Labs: what’s new, what’s next, and our vision for the open source community
6. Performance testing
Performance testing is essential to consistenly prevent system failures and deliver reliable software. Our community members are looking to learn more about how teams can use Grafana k6, the open source load testing tool, or Grafana Cloud k6, the fully managed performance testing platform, to achieve these goals.
Content examples:
- Carvana speeds up test creation by 100% with Grafana k6
- Basics of load testing with k6 and Grafana in 20 minutes
7. Cost control
As organizations scale their observability strategy, managing costs can become a challenge. That’s why we offer the Grafana Cloud cost management hub, a centralized suite of tools that helps administrators control and optimize their observability spend, as well as Adaptive Metrics, a metrics management and cardinality optimization feature in Grafana Cloud that eliminates unused and partially used metrics through aggregation. We’d love to hear about your experience with these tools, along with your general cost management best practices.
Content examples:
- How Exabeam gained insight and control over 20 million active time series with Grafana Cloud
- Reduce metrics volume in minutes: How SailPoint manages cardinality and costs with Grafana Cloud
8. Ease of use
When we talk to Grafana users within the community, one of the things they say they value most about the tool is how easy it is to learn and use. That said, we’re always striving to further optimize the Grafana user experience and make the onboarding process as seamless as possible —whether it’s through guided workflows or better tips in the UI. We’d love to hear about your unique user experience with the data visualization tool.
Content examples:
- Grafana’s new navigation: A journey of user experience, design, and continuous improvement
- Monitor Linux with ease: the Grafana Cloud integration gets a major update
9. SLOs
Grafana SLO provides a framework to create, manage, monitor, and alert on your service level objectives (SLOS). Engineering teams can use SLOs to collect data on system reliability over time and, as a result, reduce alert fatigue and focus on what matters most: providing a high quality service to customers.
Content examples:
- Create and manage SLOs in Grafana Cloud
- How Dapper Labs uses Grafana Cloud to meet the global demand of NFT-mania
10. OpenTelemetry
Grafana Labs is fully committed to the OpenTelemetry open source project, building compatibility into our own OSS projects and products, while remaining actively involved in the OTel community. Interoperability between OpenTelemetry and Prometheus has also been a main area of focus for us.
As OpenTelemetry adoption grows within the observability community, we frequently get requests around how to best implement an OTel strategy.
Content examples
- Best practices in Observability and OpenTelemetry at Deutsche Bank
- With OpenTelemetry, ComplyAdvantage overhauled its observability (twice)
How to submit your blogs, talks, and more
While we hope the topics above provide some inspiration for future presentations, videos or blog posts, this is by no means an exhaustive list — we welcome all ideas related to Grafana open source projects and our OSS ecosystem. To submit your application for a blog or talk, please fill out this form.
Present at GrafanaCON 2024
Want to share your story at our biggest community event of the year? GrafanaCON 2024 is taking place 9-10 April in Amsterdam, and we’re looking for speakers to present real-world experiences, tips and tricks, dashboard demos, and cool use cases. The GrafanaCON 2024 CFP is open for submissions until 20 February. Submit your talk today!
We look forward to hearing from you!
Community is at the heart of Grafana. Find out how you can join our passionate and growing community today.
