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A key trend in the evolution of IT systems now is that enterprises are making moves from basic visibility to network observability. This is where IT pros can use the data to solve critical problems that cause business-interrupting issues. Monitoring is important but incomplete; observability takes the data from monitoring and puts it into action. It creates the ability to understand why networks are slow, what the source of anomalies are, and if a user is compliant.
IT observability, when combined with AI and automation, also holds the promise to deliver the actionable answers needed to ensure cloud-native applications work perfectly and deliver the best experience and value possible to their users.
Self-hosted, cloud-based service
New York City-based Grafana Labs is all about IT observability. On Feb. 17, it unveiled what it calls Grafana Enterprise Stack, a complete, self-hosted observability cloud service that extends functionality for mature IT systems with the need for additional scalability and connectivity.
Grafana Enterprise Stack includes Grafana Enterprise, Enterprise Metrics for Prometheus-as-a-service, and the new Enterprise Logs, a scalable self-hosted log aggregation solution based on Grafana Loki.
This news comes on the heels of the company’s Grafana Cloud/free tier launch last month.
The 7-year-old open and composable monitoring and observability platform provider has more than 1,000 customers, including Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase and Sony, with more than 600,000 active installations of Grafana globally, Grafana said.
The company said the self-managed Enterprise Stack has important features that include:
- data source plugins for visualizing other commercial tools in Grafana, such as Splunk, New Relic, MongoDB, ServiceNow, Oracle, Snowflake and others;
- reporting, enhanced authentication and security, and
- 24/7 support from the Grafana Labs team.
Grafana also said Enterprise Stack expands upon the capabilities of some of the most popular open-source observability projects, including Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, and Cortex. Designed and built by many of the original creators and current maintainers of these projects, GES includes features that provide better scalability, collaboration, operations and governance in a self-managed environment.
Unique log indexing approach
Using Loki’s unique log indexing approach, Enterprise Logs enables increased scalability and improved cost efficiency for Grafana customers. Key features included in Grafana Enterprise Logs include:
- Instance management, allowing users to visually build and manage instances, access policies, and tokens. Users can also quickly create new data sources and view system configurations.
- Access to admin API, making it easier for administrators to distribute and limit access to specific logs and users across large organizations.
- Enhanced security, with access policies and tokens built into the platform to ensure enterprise-level accessibility and integrity.
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