Preface

Hello and welcome! Observability with Grafana is a book about the tools offered by Grafana Labs for observability and monitoring. Grafana Labs is an industry-leading provider of open source tools to collect, store, and visualize data collected from IT systems. This book is primarily aimed toward IT engineers who will interact with these systems, whatever discipline they work in.

We have written this book as we have seen some common problems across organizations:

• Systems that were designed without a strategy for scaling are being pushed to handle additional data load or teams using the system
• Operational costs are not being attributable correctly in the organization, leading to poor cost analysis and management
• Incident management processes that treat the humans involved as robots without sleep schedules or parasympathetic nervous systems

In this book, we will use the OpenTelemetry Demo application to simulate a real-world environment and send the collected data to a free Grafana Cloud account that we will create. This will guide you through the Grafana tools for collecting telemetry and also give you hands-on experience using the administration and support tools offered by Grafana. This approach will teach you how to run the Grafana tools in a way so that anyone can experiment and learn independently.

This is an exciting time for Grafana, identified as a visionary in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability (https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/4500499). They recently delivered change in two trending areas:

• Cost reduction: This has seen Grafana as the first vendor in the observability space to release tools that not only help you understand your costs but also reduce them.
• Artificial intelligence (AI): Grafana has introduced generative AI tools that assist daily operations in simple yet effective ways – for example, writing an incident summary automatically. Grafana Labs also recently purchased Asserts.ai to simplify root cause analysis and accelerate problem detection.

We hope you enjoy learning some new things with us and have fun doing it!