Grafana Labs Strengthens Cloud Native Ecosystem with Major OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes Monitoring Updates

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 5, 2024 — Grafana Labs today is sharing substantial contributions it has made to the open source community to make it easier to use projects in the CNCF ecosystem, including OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, which continue to skyrocket in popularity. In addition, the company is unveiling new features tailored for Kubernetes platform teams using Grafana Cloud.

These announcements come in advance of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, the industry’s largest open source conference dedicated to Kubernetes, Prometheus, and other cloud native technologies, taking place November 12-15 in Salt Lake City, Utah. These new developments will be featured at the Grafana Labs KubeCon booth #R7.

Strengthening the Commitment to Open Source Innovation and Interoperability

According to Grafana Labs’ 2024 Observability Survey, the vast majority of respondents are adopting multiple observability solutions, with 89% investing in Prometheus and 85% in OpenTelemetry – and 40% using both. Grafana Labs is one of the only companies serving as a leading contributor to both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, and its engineers have played a pivotal role in the advancement and adoption of these projects.

The team has championed major features to enhance interoperability between the technologies, including driving OpenTelemetry compatibility in the newly released Prometheus 3.0, which was previewed by Arve Knudsen and Jesús Vázquez, Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineers and Prometheus maintainers, at PromCon 2024.

“As the cloud native ecosystem develops, we see firsthand how a ‘big tent’ approach drives innovation, which is a philosophy we embrace at Grafana Labs. Organizations aren’t choosing between OpenTelemetry and Prometheus – they’re using both, alongside many other tools, to solve real problems,” said Tom Wilkie, CTO, Grafana Labs. “At Grafana Labs, we embrace this diversity of technologies. We’re one of the biggest contributors to the Prometheus project, have a supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry distributor called Grafana Alloy, and build solutions like the OpenTelemetry Datadog Receiver to reflect this philosophy: We’re building bridges between different observability approaches, contributing upstream to multiple open source communities, and ensuring teams can use the right tool for the right job. This is how open source should work – inclusive, interoperable, and focused on solving real user needs.”

With the continued growth and adoption of these foundational open source projects, Grafana Labs engineers remain focused on making them easier to use, including:

• Grafana Alloy: At GrafanaCON earlier this year, Grafana Labs introduced Grafana Alloy, a distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector that is 100% OTLP compatible and offers native pipelines for both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry formats, supporting metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. It’s vendor-agnostic by design and compatible anywhere the OpenTelemetry Collector or Prometheus Agent is used while also being flexible enough to cater to different users, large and small, at any phase of their observability journey. Grafana Alloy 1.3 was recently released, including enhanced debugging capabilities. This new feature provides real-time data monitoring to help visualize data transformations, identify and isolate errors, and analyze pipeline behavior.
• OpenTelemetry Datadog receiver: In June, Grafana Labs engineers released new open source code that allows users to translate Datadog metric formats into native OTLP format. These metrics that are collected and translated by the OpenTelemetry Datadog receiver can be sent to any OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics system, whether it is Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, or another backend database. The receiver, marked as experimental, is available as both a Grafana Alloy and OpenTelemetry component.
• Queryless metrics exploration with OpenTelemetry: Introduced earlier this year, Explore Metrics provides a no-code experience for browsing and analyzing Prometheus-compatible metrics without needing to write PromQL queries. Now, Explore Metrics is expanding to automatically handle OpenTelemetry metrics, eliminating the need for users to create separate queries for each system. This unified approach means users can access and visualize more types of metrics through a single, consistent interface regardless of whether the data is in Prometheus or OpenTelemetry format. The feature is available by default in Grafana and can be turned off if there are edge cases. This development represents Grafana Labs’ larger commitment to improving compatibility between OpenTelemetry and Prometheus while meeting users where they are no matter what formats they use.

Grafana Cloud Expands Kubernetes Monitoring Capabilities

Kubernetes Monitoring is a solution for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting within the fully managed Grafana Cloud observability platform. It provides a single pane of glass across your Kubernetes infrastructure, offering out-of-the-box visualizations of user data, cost monitoring insights, preconfigured alerts, alert rules, recording rules, and AI/ML predictions to simplify tasks that have been historically complex and time-consuming to achieve with just kubectl.

The solution’s real-time visibility, alerting, and troubleshooting capabilities for Kubernetes environments help organizations like Beeswax efficiently manage and optimize their container-based infrastructure. James Wojewoda, Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Beeswax, said, “Kubernetes Monitoring on Grafana Cloud enables our engineers to have native monitoring. No longer do they have to reach out to our SRE team. Instead, they just click a button on the Grafana Cloud integrations tab, navigate to the out-of-the-box dashboard, and see all the information — CPU usage, logs, metrics — they need to solve the problem themselves. It’s so simple, helps us spot issues fast, and saves us all a lot of custom development time.”

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs provides an open and composable observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. There are 5,000+ Grafana Labs customers, including Bloomberg, Citigroup, Dell Technologies, Salesforce, and TomTom, and 25M+ Grafana users around the world. Grafana Labs helps companies achieve their observability goals with the LGTM Stack, which features scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo) as well as extensive enterprise data source plugins, dashboard management, alerting, reporting, and security. The fully managed Grafana Cloud offering helps organizations get observability up and running easier and faster, with turnkey solutions for Kubernetes and infrastructure monitoring, incident response management, load testing, application observability, and more.

Source: Grafana Labs