At its annual conference, GrafanaCon, Grafana Labs announced updates to two of its open source projects (Grafana and Loki) and announced a new open source project (Grafana Alloy).
“Our goal is to make it easier and faster for anyone—whether they’re landing on the moon or tracking their daily commute—to get started with the ability to observe, and today’s announcements at GrafanaCON are another big step in that direction,” said Tom Wilkie, Technical Director of Grafana Labs. “Grafana users can build a fully composable observation stack with Loki as the data backend and Alloy as the data pipeline, which then feeds that data into Grafana for visualization. This open source interoperable suite will help users achieve new levels of efficiency and insight.”
Grafana 11.0 adds several new features, such as Explore Metrics, which is a new way to interact with Prometheus metrics without prompts so users can determine the root cause of a problem, and Explore Logs, which is similar but for Loki logs.
Other updates include improved visualizations, simpler alerting, 11 new data sources, integration with Tempo and Traces, the new Grafana App Platform, and the ability to configure SSO from the user interface.
Loki 3.0 introduces Bloom filters, which allow queries to search text strings, such as order IDs and customer IDs. It also adds native support for OpenTelemetry.
Also announced was Grafana Alloy, which is an open source distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. The company sees it as a “Big Tent” aggregator that will unify data from Grafana, OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.
“We believe organizations should own their observation strategy, choose their own tools and have the freedom to bring all their data together in one view. Grafana Alloy helps you achieve just that as a telemetry collector that is compatible with a variety of different signals that can meet a wide variety of different needs,” Richard Lam, Director of Product at Grafana, wrote in blog post.