Used by developers who want to monitor, visualize, and understand their systems, Grafana is an open source platform that brings all the metrics, logs, and traces under one roof, facilitating easy troubleshooting, better performance insights, and more informed decision-making.
Grafana Labs is behind that and many other open source observability tools that help developers monitor, analyze, and improve system performance at scale. Every year, they conduct GrafanaCON in Seattle, Washington, a community-driven event where new launches drop and people get together to make new connections and share ideas.
As expected, this year's GrafanaCON hasn't disappointed, with a new Grafana release, the introduction of Grafana Assistant, a stable release for Grafana k6, and Grafana Beyla being given a new home.
Let's see what's in store. 😄
Grafana 12 Release
The latest release of their flagship open source product, Grafana, is here. With a focus on what the user needs, the developers have introduced a new JSON structure that separates general settings from dashboard content, making the overall layout much cleaner and easier to work with.
Based on that, they have brought in dynamic dashboards, which allow for more flexible dashboard creation and access to better customization tools.
Plus, there is now support for Git Sync,letting users automatically sync their Grafana dashboards to a GitHub repository, allowing them to review any changes, making way for more portable dashboards. There is also support for 15 new data sources: Azure CosmosDB, Cloudflare, Atlassian Statuspage, Amazon DynamoDB, and PagerDuty.
Grafana 12 is available from the official website if you are looking to deploy it on your systems.
Grafana Lab's Beyla has been donated to the OpenTelemetry project, with a new name being coined, "OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation". If you didn't know, Beyla is an open source tool that helps developers track how their apps are performing without the need for them to fiddle with any code.
However, this doesn't mean that Grafana Beyla will cease to exist. It has just become the downstream to OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation and will continue to exist in Grafana Lab's product lineup.
Speaking on this, Nikola Grcevski, Principal Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, added that:
About six months ago, Grafana Labs started on a journey to donate Beyla to the OpenTelemetry project. We realized that Beyla had one superpower: it was able to instrument and generate telemetry where all other approaches failed.
This is when we understood that Beyla needs to become a true community-owned project under the OpenTelemetry umbrella.
If you are interested in learning more, the new upstream repository is over at GitHub.
Launched as a "context-aware chat experience", Grafana Assistant is a new AI-powered addition for Grafana Cloud users that can take in prompts about the user's observability data via an intuitive interface.
It helps the user carry out a range of tasks like navigating to a specific view, creating new dashboards according to natural language prompts, and making batch changes to dashboards.
As for availability, Grafana Assistant is being rolled out gradually, with a private preview being made available for limited users.
Grafana k6 1.0 Release
Finally, after nearly a decade of development, the first stable release of Grafana Labs’ open source performance testing tool, k6, has landed, bringing native extension support, TypeScript compatibility, a revamped end-of-test summary page, and a promise of production-grade stability.
You can get Grafana k6 1.0 from the official website, which has instructions for configuring it via Grafana Cloud and self-hosting it.
Here's why you should opt for It's FOSS Plus Membership:
- Even the biggest players in the Linux world don't care about desktop Linux users. We do. - We don't put informational content behind paywall. Your support keeps it open for everyone. Think of it like 'pay it forward'. - Don't like ads? With the Plus membership, you get an ad-free reading experience. - When millions of AI-generated content is being published daily, you read and learn from real human Linux users. - It costs just $2 a month, less than the cost of your favorite burger.
Become a Plus Member today and join over 300 people in supporting our work.
