Best of Grafana — November 2025

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    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·23w

    The Grafana trust problem

    An experienced engineer shares their journey with Grafana's observability stack, detailing how frequent architectural changes, deprecations, and increasing complexity have eroded trust. Starting with simple Loki/Prometheus setups, they've witnessed rapid product churn—Grafana Agent deprecated within 2-3 years, OnCall discontinued, and Mimir 3.0 now requiring Kafka. The constant restructuring, incompatibilities with Prometheus Operator standards, and career-driven development pace make it difficult to maintain stable monitoring infrastructure. While acknowledging the technical quality of Grafana products, the author questions their long-term viability and considers alternatives like the kube-prometheus-stack with Thanos.

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    Article
    Avatar of grafanaGrafana Labs·23w

    A Star Wars dashboard deep dive: How to build your next visualization in less than 12 parsecs

    A detailed walkthrough of building a Star Wars-themed Grafana dashboard, covering practical techniques like using stat panels for custom text styling, TestData plugin for simulating dynamic data, canvas panels for creating custom visualizations with animations, and styling approaches for visual consistency. Demonstrates how to create gauges, charts, maps, and custom layouts while explaining the technical implementation behind each component.

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    Article
    Avatar of grafanaGrafana Labs·23w

    Understand, diagnose, and optimize SQL queries: Introducing Grafana Cloud Database Observability

    Grafana Cloud Database Observability is now in public preview, offering developers, SREs, and DBAs tools to understand, diagnose, and optimize SQL queries. The solution addresses the visibility gap in database performance by providing query-level insights, execution plans, wait event analysis, and AI-powered optimization suggestions. It supports MySQL and PostgreSQL, integrates with Grafana Alloy for telemetry collection, and correlates database metrics with application and infrastructure data for comprehensive system-wide performance analysis.

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    Article
    Avatar of grafanaGrafana Labs·24w

    Grafana Mimir 3.0 release: performance improvements, a new query engine, and more

    Grafana Mimir 3.0 introduces a redesigned architecture that separates read and write operations using Apache Kafka as an asynchronous buffer, eliminating performance bottlenecks between ingestion and queries. The release features the Mimir Query Engine (MQE), which processes queries in a streaming fashion rather than bulk loading, reducing peak memory usage by up to 92%. These improvements deliver 15% lower resource usage in large clusters while maintaining faster query execution and higher reliability. The new ingest storage component ensures query spikes won't slow down data ingestion and vice versa, enabling independent scaling of each path.

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    Article
    Avatar of grafanaGrafana Labs·22w

    Grafana Play updates: A redesigned homepage to celebrate our community

    Grafana Play, a free sandbox environment for exploring Grafana, has launched a redesigned homepage that emphasizes community contributions and makes features more discoverable. The update includes new sections like Featured Grafana Contributor, Dashboard of the Month, and Play Launchpad with Grafana Arcade games. The redesign uses existing visualization plugins and aims to create a more welcoming, playful experience while highlighting creative dashboards from the community. Future plans include adding a full demo of the LGTM Stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir).

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