Zero yuan early adopters | Alibaba Cloud Grafana commercial service officially released

Author: Bai Yu

With the continuous implementation of cloud-native technologies, for distributed applications and containers, observability covering front-end to back-end has become an essential operation and maintenance capability for enterprises. With features such as rich visual dashboards and access to multiple data sources, Grafana has become the de facto standard for cloud-native observability. According to the "End User Technology Radar" report published by CNCF, two-thirds of respondents cited Grafana and Prometheus as their preferred observability tools. But most operation and maintenance personnel have encountered one or more of the following scenarios:

• It belongs to the primary level of operation and maintenance, and can't handle the deployment of the open source community version of Grafana;
• The daily workload is large, and there is not enough time to maintain the Grafana system on a daily basis, including the update of related components and the overall expansion of the system;
• The business launch is very urgent, and a corresponding monitoring system needs to be in place immediately;
• Enterprise users want to use Grafana services, but there are ROI considerations for cost and availability.

In order to help operation and maintenance personnel to solve the above problems, Alibaba Cloud, as the first in-depth partner of Grafana Labs and cloud vendors in the Asia-Pacific region, was officially released by Jiang Jiangwei (Xiao Xie), general manager of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Basic Products Division at the Yunqi Conference in China. The first Grafana hosting service.

Today, 6 months later, the public beta of Alibaba Cloud Grafana service has been fully completed, and the official commercial version has been released. Compared with the public beta stage, this official release has added many functional upgrades. In addition to fully supporting the use of Grafana 8.x, the Grafana service's own high availability and observability, data isolation, network security, and data integration center are greatly improved.

As a fully managed service, users can easily and quickly create scalable Grafana workspaces on demand, enabling users to efficiently analyze and view metrics, logs, and traces without paying attention to complicated tasks such as server configuration and software updates, effectively reducing operational costs. Dimensional complexity and workload. And with Alibaba Cloud's powerful cloud-native capabilities, Grafana's security and usability are comprehensively improved.

Interpretation of new capabilities

Enhanced visualization capabilities with Grafana

Grafana 8.x adds a number of new visualization features, such as new panel library features such as status timeline, status history, bar charts and histograms, allowing users to build charts and reuse them across multiple boards. At the same time, Grafana 8.x greatly improves the initial download or graphics rendering performance and improves the user experience.

Service High Availability & Data Security

In order to ensure high service availability and data security, Alibaba Cloud Grafana services are fully optimized from multiple dimensions.

1. Data source security : Ensuring data source security is the primary focus of operation and maintenance monitoring. Alibaba Cloud Grafana serves VPC data through the CEN corporate network. Cloud service integration is licensed through RAM SLR. Ensure data security of data sources.
2. Data storage : Each workspace is allocated an independent RDS and an isolated NAS, and user data is encrypted and stored.
3. Exclusive workspace : The workspace is exclusive and isolated by the network to avoid mutual interference. The workspace ensures high availability through multiple instances and elastic scaling.
4. Load balancing : Workspace instances achieve high availability through SLB load balancing, and provide network whitelisting and HTTPS certificates to improve data security.

Data Integration Center

The integration center covers common data sources such as ARMS application monitoring, Prometheus service, log service SLS, cloud monitoring, OpenTelemetry link tracking, Alibaba Cloud Lindorm data service, Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch service, and Alibaba Cloud table storage service OTS. Deep integration reduces the workload of data source access as much as possible. Provides VPC data channels to achieve cross-region and cross-VPC network connectivity.

self-observability

In addition to monitoring corresponding applications or components, Alibaba Cloud's Grafana service provides its own observability capabilities, which help enterprises understand the operational status of Grafana services more clearly from different dimensions such as response delay, resource usage, and user statistics. These include:

1. Overview : Grafana service startup time, basic resource usage, users, organizations, basic statistics of Dashboards, service usage status (API, data request proxy, page).
2. Latency (response latency) : Average latency of the broad panel (Search, Get, Save), latency 95, 99 distribution of the broad panel (Search, Get, Save), data source query average latency and 95, 99 distribution.
3. Counter (Statistics) : User statistics distribution (Admin, Viewer, Editor), organization, folder, dashboard, dashboard version, data source statistics, login information statistics (username password, OAuth, LDAP, Aliyun).

Compared with open source, a more complete and worry-free hosting service

Compared with the self-built Grafana service, Alibaba Cloud Grafana provides more convenient services.

Difference between different versions

As an important product concept of Grafana, "Dashboard anything, Observe everything", Alibaba Cloud Grafana service aims to further help many domestic digital transformation and Internet companies to use their imaginations, to see the overall situation, and to create a complete and flexible observable system.

From May 18, 2022, Alibaba Cloud Grafana service will be divided into shared version, expert version, and advanced version. The "shared version" is the free version, and the expert version and the advanced version are paid commercial versions. On the basis of the standard version, the commercial version enhances functions and services such as data sources, basic functions, number of users, technical support, etc., and continuously improves the observability capability, reducing the threshold for observability in the production environment. From now on, you can choose the version you want based on the function comparison below. Welcome to the Grafana service activation experience!

Surprise sale

In order to thank many users for their support, the Grafana service has launched a zero-dollar purchase activity for all users in the first month, so that more companies can use Grafana services that are more convenient and cheaper.

Click here to view the offer now!