
Grafana Labs raises $24M - netingle
https://grafana.com/blog/2019/10/24/what-24-million-means-for-our-open-source-community/
======
KaiserPro
Grafana and graphite are what makes managing large infrastructure manageable.

I was introduced to grafana in early 2014. I was a bit sceptical as I was
using graphitus to make dashboards. However I soon converted.

I maintained a very large graphite cluster at the Financial Times (I think it
was about 1 million active metrics, but it might have be 0.5 mill, I forget)
The only sane way to manage the front end was using grafana. Simple oauth2
integration meant that I could avoid the nightmare of trying to get AD access,
and it also mean't one click SSO.

Grafana was one of those tools that was self evidently the best in class, so
it was widely adopted. Within two years, virtually every team screen had
grafana on it. Non programmers used it, and even set alerts. How many other
"devop" tool can boast that level of universality?

Either way, keep up the good work, and best of luck.

~~~
bt3
As someone that recently consulted for a F500 client and had to make
recommendations regarding their Grafana instance (among other things), we
noted they were curating too many metrics (somewhere in the thousands). Our
belief being that if you're providing stakeholders with so many metrics,
you're forcing them to make their own decisions regarding what's valuable to
track and what's not - rather than allowing leadership to provide direction as
to how they're measuring performance, etc.

I can't imagine what it'd be like (as a stakeholder), using a Grafana instance
that, in total, has >500k metrics. Would assume many of those are depreciated/
do not provide any value/ or do not spur any action by stakeholders.

~~~
jldugger
I've worked with similar scale, and the situation is basically that when you
have a thousand people working on a service, they have different needs. Ops
needs a variety of host and container level metrics. Not just for action by
stakeholders, but for autoscaling, autoremediation, etc. If you have a few
thousand servers, you're probably talking 100k metrics right off the bat. More
if you want statsd aggregate metrics instead of just one summary stat.

And if you have microservices, you want to track how well each client-server
pair is doing, on both sides of the equation, which means tracking error
codes, success/fail rates, etc.

Finance wants its own metrics to measure capacity versus utilization to prove
to the CFO the spending is appropriately constrained.

Devs want to prove their system works and works quickly, so you'll have a
variety of metrics revolving around subcomponent usage, and performance
timing. Maybe even cache rates.

Not all of these metrics will spark action by stakeholders. Some will be
retained 'just in case' since you can't retroactively collect data. When perf
drops, in a canary because GC pauses are increasing, you definitely want to be
able see both performance metrics over time as well as GC metrics.

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cip01
Grafana is such a pleasure to work with. I hope all that money won't destroy a
nice project.

Congratulations! :)

~~~
thomasfl
I hope the money won't be used to hire a bunch of graphic designers who want's
to totally changes how everything looks. I really love the sexy color schemes
and user interface as it is. If they want to do changes, I really hope the
only do incremental changes to what's already there.

~~~
davkal
Director of UX here. We're trying to focus on improving existing workflows and
less on visual design changes. That being said, form styles will be overhauled
soon.

~~~
athenot
As a general principle, my plea is PLEASE keep a check on the number of clicks
to do something.

The range picker used to be great where you had a text field allowing you to
quickly type a time range in a single field; now it's:

\- 1 click on the time range;

\- 1 click on Custom Time Range;

\- tab or click on the From Field;

\- tab or click on the To Field.

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roland35
I have had some good success using Grafana to visualize live data from a fleet
of robots - I started out with graphite as the data store but quickly moved to
InfluxDB which had better performance. Overall it was a very impressive tool
which required little set up and configuration!

~~~
edge17
Does Grafana update fast enough for visualizing data from sensors on robots?
(in particular for tracking positional information or response information if
tuning/monitoring PIDs etc.)?

~~~
davkal
Director of UX here. This year we rewrote a lot of the data flow plumbing in
grafana to allow streaming with the very goal to enable sensor and other high
frequency use cases. More to come soon

~~~
Rebelgecko
How much of those improvements is in current versions of Grafana? I've tried
building some dashboards in Chronograf for some data I work with, but there's
a lot of sensors that update very quickly so the graphs basically killed the
browser tab. If Grafana is better at handling that sort of use case I'll
definitely check it out.

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Spidler
Grafana seems amazing at first.

Variables to abstract out some, a bit of "repeat" to loop over something, and
you get pretty drop-downs that you can combine to show nice graphs.

Then you think "I'll add it to a playlist". and you do so.

Then you think "my kiosk can't scroll this much for all, let's have one screen
each for the apps" and you do.

And then you realize you cannot use variables from playlists, and you cannot
template screens.

So you make eight copies of your screen, one for each variable configuration.

And you edit each copy of your screen to set the variables, and save it.

And then you realize that there was a typo in one panel.

So you go in and edit in eight different screens to fix that typo.

Then you realize that it doesn't look good on the TN panel, so you need to
change a few colours to get better contrast.

So you do that on eight different copies, by the means of clicking in every
pane, navigating through the point-n-click and then pressing.

But you realized that you learned this, so you're fast, and use the keyboard.
Except then the change doesn't take.

Because grafana requires you to click in another field after you've edited, or
your change doesn't hold if you press "Escape" or other key to navigate back.

And that's how I learned how Grafana is best of breed in GUI dashboard tools.
Sort of how a pug is best of breed in a dog competition.

~~~
OldFatCactus
I use Ansible + Jinja2 templates to create and update my dashboards. Minor
tweaks and changes can be pushed to hundreds of dashboards using the grafana
API

~~~
rocmcd
This sounds really interesting. Do you have anything public you can share on
this?

~~~
OldFatCactus
I don't have an easy way of sharing this but I'm free to answer any questions
about it.

My process is 1\. identify services that benefit from a generated dashboard (a
service that I am running hundreds of instances of, for instance) 2\. create
the first dashboard by manually 3\. export the dashboard to JSON and turn it
into a jinja2 template 4\. use ansible to access the cloud provider api to get
whatever metadata I need to populate the now templated dashboard 5\. store the
updated dashboard as code and also push it to Grafana via API with Ansible

This is all automated and you can skip all the way to step 4/5 if you plumb
this to your service build/delivery automation.

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netingle
Hi! Tom from Grafana Labs here to answer any questions you might have...

~~~
foobarian
Hi, awesome project and a pleasure to use! Would love to be able to use
variables in alert metrics :-)

~~~
danlimerick
We know that there are some gaps in the alerting feature (we dogfood it
ourselves). The Grafana team will be focusing a lot more on alerting in 2020.
For Grafana 7.0 in May, we are aiming to build better alerting that retains
the simplicity of the current alerting but that will fill some of the those
gaps. The new engine will decouple alerting from the graph panel and hopefully
sidestep the problem with template variables. Once we have got further in the
design stage then we will share more with the community about the proposed
solutions.

~~~
core-questions
This sounds fantastic, excited to see it.

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stevedonovan
Our partners are very happy Grafana users. But I've observed some pain when
they construct dashboards and alerts for each new device added. They are going
to add thousands so this is very labour intensive! Some kind of "smart clone"
would be very useful. (Thousands of dashboards feels like an anti-pattern, but
alerts attached to thousands of sources is not)

~~~
netingle
Definitely! I'd recommend using variables so you don't have to replicate the
dashboards, but they don't work with alerts (yet). You could also use
something like grafonnet or grafana-lib to generate dashboards with code.

Lots of options - Watch this space!

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alexvaut
Love the idea to see more integration with traces, I did integrate traces of
jaeger within a diagram view inside grafana few months ago:
[https://github.com/alexvaut/OpenTracingDiagram](https://github.com/alexvaut/OpenTracingDiagram).
I'm wondering what are the plans in this area with OpenTelemetry ? I found
that [https://grafana.com/blog/2019/10/21/whats-next-for-
observabi...](https://grafana.com/blog/2019/10/21/whats-next-for-
observability/) but it doesn't tell me much...

~~~
davkal
Director of UX here, we do want to integrate a trace viewer soon. We actively
talking to Uber to find ways of directly reusing their Jäger components. Still
considering other options too. Will check out your project!

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rutthenut
Sounds promising. Have found Grafana really good, flexible and usable with
many available data sources and display options. Hope it continues to move
forward and make it easier to get it adopted within my organisation.

~~~
davkal
I'm curious to hear what the hurdles are. Let me know if you want to chat, I'm
David at Grafana.

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ElijahLynn
I love Grafana and had no idea it was working on logs and tracing, only
metrics!

"That goes hand-in-hand with pushing forward with our vision of building an
open, composable observability platform that brings together the three pillars
of observability – logs, metrics, and traces – in a single experience, with
Grafana at the center."

~~~
lxe
Interesting. I thought graphana was a metrics-targeted clone of Kibana, which
was for ElasticSearch/Logs/Traces visualization. Sounds like it went full
circle.

~~~
sciurus
Yep. And on the kibana side, they support metrics now too.

[https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/7.4/timelion.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/7.4/timelion.html)

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gvv
I've recently managed to make Prometheus+Grafana stateless using
[https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex](https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex)
if anyone is having issues with scaling / backing up.

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claytongulick
What I'd really like to see is a more generic approach to data visualization
done with the same care and expertise as is displayed with the time series
visualization currently. Perhaps this would be a different product under the
same brand, but I believe that the data viz space has a lot of room for
competition - tableaux and power bi, etc... are leaving a lot of room for
competition. I'm currently looking closely at redash because of this, would
love it if I could solve the same problems with grafana.

*note: I know that to some degree this is possible with current grafana, but if you read through the issues folks have with doing data viz outside of time series, you'll catch my meaning.

~~~
davkal
Ryan (mentioned in the article) is building a team around this (non-timeseries
data, sensors data, manufacturing). Head to our hiring page if you want to
join his R&D team (US-remote).

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lucaspottersky
I tried it 2 years ago. It was easy to get started, but not quite
straightforward to extend it and use custom panels.

Also, it didn't support image uploads, you'd need to host them somewhere else
if you wanted them to show up in a panel. rather inconvenient.

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alexnewman
This is what Open Source Companies need to look like. Honestly the more they
do stuff like this, the more this makes graphite's hosted options the only
game in town I trust.

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Sytten
There is a big market IMO for companies that want to offer a managed grafana
to their users. Just take a look at the latest offering from Logz or hosted-
graphite. We also do it where I work. It is really not easy, but I hope it
will get better. I would happily pay to get support from them and features
that facilitate my life.

~~~
netingle
We do that at Grafana Labs are part of Grafana Cloud...

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SEJeff
As Grafana Labs customers we're super happy to see you doing well. We look
forward to seeing what happens next.

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pharkmillups
We recently converted an internal dashboard for the Helium blockchain to a
public tool and the reception/usefulness has been awesome. (For anyone
interested -> [http://dashboard.helium.com](http://dashboard.helium.com))

Congrats to the team. Well-deserved.

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tengbretson
With the way DataDog has changed their pricing Grafana Labs should be
absolutely making hay right now.

~~~
therealdrag0
What drives me nuts about DataDog is the inability to build charts with
wildcards.

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sandGorgon
Is there a docker-compatible logging client that pipes to hosted grafana ?

I've been wondering about why there are not more elastic based or grafana
based hosted solutions.

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darkglobe
Amazing news, can't wait to see what's next!

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OldFatCactus
Love your product! Can you build an official Mongo Atlas datasource? :)

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GhettoMaestro
I love Grafana. I really hope these guys (and gals) do great.

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bbbyyeb
How is it different than Splunk? I mean what does Splunk do that this won’t?
Just curious.

~~~
http501
You can check out the Product and Technology Keynote
[https://conf.splunk.com/#iCpzv3oYWQiqK1jT17dsLG](https://conf.splunk.com/#iCpzv3oYWQiqK1jT17dsLG)

