Let’s break the ice 🧊

Community Matters
1

We’d love to learn more about you, whether you’re new or a community veteran!

Introduce yourself*, tell us where you’re from and a bit about your hobbies. Optional: your favourite Grafana feature :grin:

Want to get extra creative? :artist_palette: Head to your favourite AI tool, and ask it to create a limerick including your name, your hobbies and any other interesting info.

E.g.
There once was a dancer named Eva,
Whose dashboards were sharp as a cleaver.
She’d read and she’d bake,
Then code for a break—
Grafana by day, cook by fever!

*(Regular and cheesy introductions are both welcome).

6 Likes
2

Hi there - I’m Simon from Nottingham, England. I recently started work as a Developer Advocate at Grafana, but have used Grafana dashboards on a variety of projects for some time now.

You’ll usually find me tinkering with some IoT or maker project or another, which I try and document on my website and/or GitHub. I enjoy building things with Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers and MicroPython, but you’ll find all sorts of other projects there. I’m always happy to talk about these and answer questions. Other interests include travel, aviation, reading and cycling.

I asked ChatGPT to make a limerick based on the above, and we got…

Simon from Nottingham’s crew,
Builds dashboards with Grafana in view.
When he’s not on the clock,
He’s crafting IoT stock—
With Picos and planes in the queue! :airplane::hammer_and_wrench::bar_chart:

5 Likes
3

Heyyyyoooooo Folks!!! Im Brian from Potsdam, New York. I have been working with the Grafana Stack for about 6 years now. Started off using it for hobbies, then introduced it to a colocation facility to give customers data on there machines, power consumption, and ROI. Now days im a Systems Engineer, and Freelance developer contributing to Open Source solutions. i enjoy automating things, streamlining workflows, fixing broken processes, and all together making magic happen. Always happy to engage the community to help others, discuss interesting use cases, and just network in general.Some other hobbies i have are travelling, spending time with my two huskies, i have a huge hoard of classic 80’s Audi’s i tinker with, and hiding in my cabin in the woods.

i had ChatGPT make a limerick and heres what it came up with:

There once was a tech from Potsdam,
Whose dashboards were never a sham.
With Grafana he played,
And some magic he made,
While his huskies ran wild through the dam. :paw_prints:

5 Likes
4

Hi everyone!

I am Imma from Barcelona. I have been a developer advocate at Grafana for over two years. I started my journey at Grafana k6 and have recently been diving deep into the world of OpenTelemetry and Alloy—fascinating stuff!

I’m passionate about building communities, so I love organizing meetups and community events and sharing talks or workshops. I strongly believe in allyship to make our community as diverse and welcoming as possible.

Please don’t hesitate to ping me if there’s anything I can help with, whether it’s related to these technologies, community building, or Grafana. I’m here to learn and contribute!

On a slightly different note, I’m a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, so you might even spot me at some of his concerts! Feel free to say hi if you do :waving_hand:

I asked Hemini for a limerick, and here is what I got…

From Barcelona, Imma so keen,
A Grafana advocate, plainly seen.
With OTel and more,
And meetups galore,
A Springsteen fan :guitar:, community queen!

4 Likes
5

Hi! I’m David from Virginia USA. I’ve been doing open source & free software related stuff since I was a teenager. I got started by contributing to GNU packages, and later went into working in developer advocacy in order to get a chance to do a mix of highly technical software engineering stuff combined with community & more human related things, too. I owe a huge part of my career progression to getting to be a fly on the wall in OSS communities, to learn through doing, together with other people.

My hobbies are things like 3d printing, music, and languages.

My favorite feature of Grafana is extensibility. Things like data source plugins, visualizations, and apps. Often good OSS comes with open doors, frankly we can’t do everything (nobody can) so giving people a mechanism to build anything is imho a good idea. (And that’s what they’re doing). It’s the open door that lets people express their ideas when they know better.

There once was a geeky lad Dave,
From Virginia who surfed the FOSS wave;
He hacked at old GNU
And helped devs, it’s true—
Grafana’s plug‑doors are his fave!

(I go by David, not Dave, but I’ll allow this from the AI because it rhymes)

4 Likes
6

Hi everyone!

I am Raymond from South Africa. I won the inaugural Golden Grot award. I have been using Grafana for about 3 years. I enjoy assisting the community, as I was assisted when I was learning Grafana, so I like to pay it forward! I also enjyy aquascaping in my free time!

There are so many diverse use cases, it’s always interesting to see what people use Grafana for, and what they expect it to be able to do, and most of the time you can make it do it, even if it takes a couple of ugly workarounds :slight_smile:

Reach out to me on the forum, I will try to assist where I can!

Blockquote
A data nerd sipped their banana,
While tweaking alerts in Grafana.
“This spike here at three—
That’s just me having tea!”
They graphed it and called it “Java-nana.”

6 Likes
7

Hi
I’m Niall
I am brand new to Grafana and my query skills are very rusty.
I am working with Grafana and InfluxDB

3 Likes
8

Hi Everyone,

I am very new to Grafana, im working on a project that i would like to integrate with Grafana and looking forward to learning and assisting wherever possible.

Regards,
SION

4 Likes
9

I am a massive music and movie fan, who also enjoys building Lego and I have recently started running which I am enjoying.
One adventure I’m saving up for on my bucket list is to visit the iconic Times Square in New York City, a location showcased in countless memorable movies.

4 Likes
10

Hello Team, My name is Kevin Jones and I somewhat new to GRAFANA and trying to get on master level in time… However, I have been in IT for over 36 years touch several technologies like mainframe, middleware, monitoring tools and plethora of other tools and technologies. Glory GOD who has kept me through it all.

kj

4 Likes
11

Hi there, I’m Jo from Germany out of the “Bergische Land”.
I’ve been using Grafana for round about three years.
Most of our dashboards were created with the ingenious Flow-Chart Plugin.
I miss it. :wink:
That’s how I came to work with Canvas and Business Charts.
I love musik. Porcupine Tree is high on my list at the moment.
And I love riding my motobike.

Here is what gemini says: (and I’m not the youngest anymore)

Young Jo, from the beautiful Bergische Land,
With his motorbike close at his hand.
With music his cheer,
He’d shift into gear,
Exploring each path in the land.

And I hope that I can contribute something from time to time to help someone else.

4 Likes
12

hello I am John and my experience with Grafana, is simply I know how to spell it and my company purchased this tool. Ive somehow spent almost 30years as some flavor of Network engineer/architect/support/staff position, yet never been resposible for observablity.

2 Likes
13

Hola… Soy de Colombia.
LLevo explorando Grafana un poco mas de un mes, entendiendo su funcionamiento y como poder aprovechar sus capacidades para monitorar plataforma.
Soy especialista en ambiente Microsoft, y busco monitorear iniciamente IIS.
Estoy aprendiendo de Alloy, para al lectura de informacion.

There once was a techie named Jakicl,
Whose code could make cloud servers tickle.
By day, moved data streams,
By night, stews and dreams—
Tech witch by dawn, home’s heart by nightfall.

Espero poder aportar y conseguir bastante informacion de esta comunidad para el uso de esta gran herramienta

2 Likes
14

My background is 40 years of IT consulting before retiring. The last years of job was in IT networking an security, now I just try to keep myself updated on current trends.

3 Likes
15

Hi All,

I’m totally new to Grafana, so hoping to learn as much as possible by hanging out here.

Cheers.

RP

2 Likes
16

Hi There,

My name is Ashutosh Lashiyal and I am from India. I work as a Manual Tester in an IT company. I now want to transition into Automation that is why I am here trying to know about K6. Thanks

2 Likes
17

Hi,

I’m Michael from Cologne. I’ve been working in software development for about 30 years, and I’ve recently started exploring data visualization with Grafana — and I absolutely love it.

I’m currently visualizing our household energy flow (including solar power), as well as the utilization of my Synology NAS and an application server.

I also realized that we could really benefit from integrating metrics from our own products to create live dashboards — giving us real-time insights on the fly.

Looking forward to visualizing even more things soon!

2 Likes
18

Hello all. My name is Bret and I am pretty new to Grafana. Thank you for hosting these Community Forums. I am looking forward to learning from other members.

Yesterday I deployed Grafana and Prometheus in my homelab (both for the first time) to monitor the performance and health of my computers. From the tinkering I have already done, Grafana seems like a pretty impressive tool.

My next project will be visualizing real-time sensor data as part of my interest in self-quantification. Other tools I will be using for this upcoming project include Python, InfluxDB and Docker. As well as a Raspberry Pi computer.

3 Likes
19

Hello everyone! I’m Camiliaera, excited to join this amazing community. I’m from USA, and I enjoy tinkering with tech, learning about data visualization, and working on homelab projects. I’ve recently started exploring Grafana to monitor system metrics and visualize personal data. Looking forward to learning and sharing insights with fellow enthusiasts!

4 Likes
20

Hello Everyone,

I’m one of the guys with 10+ years of experience in Logging & Monitoring (from the Splunk world), and starting out as a complete newbie here in the Grafana world, and it’s frankly quite a bit up hill to figure out how things are done here compare to Splunk.

I’m about to find my way, and have already seen a lot of great things, but what strikes me most is the amount of time it takes to find good solid descriptions (and videos) of how to do just simple things (very simple in the Splunk world at least :star_struck:).

If I may be strictly honest, I think it’s way too difficult to find good and relevant documentation using just simple Google searching on Grafana (especially Loki, that currently spend time on).

Before writing these notes, I was looking for how (if possible) to automatically format number, dates and currency automatically according to the users locals (as seen by the browser).

Yes - I ran over “Unit” → “Local format”, but that certainly don’t look local to me, as I sit in Denmark and get my numbers formatted like: 75,366, whereas it ought to be: 75.366 (dot as thousand separator here).

Looking around I see and find quite a few subjects on this topics, but no solution so far.

And another (I’d consider very very basic and novice topic), which very clearly shows my (lack) of Grafana knowledge.

I have a lot of windows event logs coming in, and I just wanted to create a very simple table (take approx. 10 min to look nice in Splunk) to show in one row (for the given time span, say 3 hours):

  • Total events
  • x additional columns based on log level showing how many of the events were: Info, Warn, Error etc.
  • Count of Unique hosts contributed
  • Count of Unique customers (dedicated field for this)

After two days of searching and watching x number of YouTubes, today I finally figured out, that not only “sum by (level) bla. bla.” could do the job, but I also had to set the “Type” to “Instant”.

I’m not to the express too much of my personal feelings here, but I’d consider myself as “kind of” Splunk query nerd, and have made all kind of “interesting things” in Splunk, and is feels strange to spend 2 days to figure out how to just show log levels as a stats window on a dashboard - very strange!

PS. I still need to get the total number of events (and their size), number of unique hosts and customers into same stats window.

Said that, there is a LOT of great thing to find, and I have seen great YouTubes - thanks to a lot of you I suppose.

Whoever reads this, and have knowledge of how to show dashboards in the end-users locale settings, please let me know haw and where :wink:

If you know of good training videos, on how to get started (as said I’ve already seen a lot), here I’m especially interested in getting stats out of my data, and turn these into KPI’s. Tips and tricks on transforms and manipulating logs to metrics etc., I’d be happy to know also :wink: