Our top takeaways of GrafanaCon 2024
As the first Dutch Grafana partner, we were thrilled to be at GrafanaCon 2024. This year even in our own homegrown city of Amsterdam. During the 2-day event we heard great announcements, spoke with interesting people and of course had great fun. For the people that couldn’t be there we summed up the key takeaways of GrafanaCon 2024!
Grafana 11
As always, there is no GrafanaCon without a new release of Grafana. This year it’s up to version 11. Some key improvements are “Explore Metrics”, organize dashboards in subfolders, generate panel titles and descriptions with AI/LLM and a new improved overview of alert rule details.
I want to highlight one of these cool new features which is “Explore Metrics”. Personally, I’m very enthusiastic about this. The Explore Metrics feature promises to help find relevant metrics in my vast number of metrics that are available. It gives me a preview of the data so I can compare metrics and select the metrics which best suits my use case. Can’t wait to see the power of this feature in action!
Want to know all about the new Grafana 11 improvements? Learn more here!
Loki 3.0
Next to Grafana, a new version of Loki was also released during the event. This to be Loki 3.0. The Loki maintainers focused their efforts on query acceleration by introducing bloom filters. A nifty way to find specific logs without looking at every single log line. Next to this they also announced native support for OpenTelemetry (OTel). Very nice to see Loki is adopting the technology that is aiming for an industry standard.
Want to know more? Look here for all the new Loki 3.0 features.
Alloy project
There cannot only be known projects, right? Indeed! At the beginning of GrafanaCon a new open-source project called “Alloy” was released. This new project is an opinionated OpenTelemetry collector which can be supported by Grafana. By doing this they can integrate years of experience in data collection with the technology of OpenTelemetry. With this release they announced that the Grafana Agent is now deprecated and is expected to be EOL on November 1, 2025. If you are currently using the Grafana Agent, we strongly recommend you have a look at this new project.
Application platform
Grafana Labs knew they had to do something to make sure they could deliver the same “Big Tent” philosophy in the future. And at first glance, it looks they delivered. They introduced a whole new way of developing plugins for Grafana. One where boundaries between plugins are a thing of the past, a plugin can watch events happening in Grafana and plugins can interact with basically every object. During the conference they referred to this model as the one that is used for Kubernetes. Indeed, it looks very similar and a great way to integrate technology that already proved itself in the industry. Some of you might know the SLO plugin created by Grafana Labs. Currently it’s only available in the Cloud version, but it was created with this new application platform. It would be great to see plugins like this coming to Grafana on-prem as well.
Explore logs
We already shared a great new improvement in Grafana for exploring metrics. During the event we also got a sneak peek at the “Explore logs” feature. This “side project” was started during a Hackathon week at Grafana Labs. As you might have figured out this feature should deliver the same experience as “Explore metrics”, but for logs. It still in early development but it shows the power of this feature and the willingness of Grafana Labs to deliver it to more than just metrics.
