[cfors]

More engineering effort going into reinventing things that already exist to upsell people on Grafana cloud.

What about focusing on the core value that Grafana provides, dashboards?

Grafana 8 alerting is still in my opinion at a beta level. Dashboards as code has made no meaningful progress outside of community attempts in the past 3 years. The documentation for Grafana 8 alerts is still subpar.

All of these things as a paid offering are more interesting than migrating my logging system or metrics system. Developers don't want to migrate their observability.

[berkes]

Seconded. While I like the idea of Grafana, and use it for some projects, it lacks features in the graphing and dashboarding part. I too presumed this is because they are spending more on backends, pipelines and collection..

I don't need more backends, pipelines or collections. I need a frontend to display the data that I have (in backends) already.

I need to:

* Be able to pipe KPIs into a storage. Doesn't need big-data, high-volume, or extreme granularity. OR

* Have grafana grab data from an API/HTTP endpoint. It does this with prometheus just fine.

* Have a way to insert some of my own figures. Currently I wire up some google-sheet to grafana and fill that. I always have some data that I cannot or will not (yet) grab automatically. Like "amount of hours spent working on project" or "MRR" or such.

Its possible with Grafana. But the experience is subpar, the tweaking and wiggling is big and the outcome is an OK-ish, but not too convincing dashboard. I'm convinced an alternative that tackles this better (for niches) will eat into grafana.

[jchw]

Understandable critique, but I absolutely love a lot of Grafana’s redundant offerings. For example, operationally speaking it is drastically simpler to set up a scalable Grafana Tempo instance than Jaeger, in my opinion. Grafana offering competent object storage backends for their software has made them dramatically easier to operate and maintain.

That’s also another thing: a decent amount of Grafana software (Mimir, Loki, Tempo…) are OSS, so while they definitely are using those softwares in their paid offering, they absolutely still benefit OSS users. I’m messing with Tempo for telemetry in my (admittedly embarrassingly weak) home lab endeavors and it’s pretty cool.

[detaro]

Is there any competitor in the "primarily dashboards" space? Plenty things I know just use Grafana for small amounts of data where all this "5 new datastores!" isn't really useful, but dashboard improvements would be welcome.

[CitizenKane]

Hey there! I work at Grafana on many of the dashboard components. Beyond dashboards as code and alerts where are you feeling the pain?

I can say that a lot of effort is going into improving dashboards in a number of different dimensions and there are definitely some exciting things on the horizon.

[INTPenis]

What issues have you seen with Grafana alerting?

I'm curious because in my view it works so well that we abandoned alertmanager for Grafana alerts only well before v8.

[cfors]

Grafana alerts (before version 8) worked great. We use them, but the Grafana 8 alerting features are half-baked at best.

* Grafana 8 alerts removed the Image Preview, which was extremely useful during issues. [0]

* Grafana 8 alerts don't have any way of being stored as code. In fact the API that they provide in their docs [0][1] doesn't work, or isn't up to date.

* The expression languages have zero documentation about them, so aren't exactly useful for things that might get a developer out of bed in the middle of the night.

[0] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/discussions/38030#discuss...

[1] https://editor.swagger.io/?url=https://raw.githubusercontent...

[2] https://community.grafana.com/t/posting-an-alert-using-grafa...

[darkwater]

How did you define alarms as code in a practical way before v8? and after?

[ArmandGrillet]

Hi, I work on Grafana Alerting. Provisioning of alert rules (and other objects used for alerting) will be possible using a new API in Grafana 8.5 and we will update the Grafana Terraform provider right after to take advantage of this new API.

[darkwater]

Great to hear! We are looking into jsonnet based approach but having an explicit and granular API and a Terraform provider would be miles and miles better. Thanks!

[INTPenis]

Did not tbh. We have an ops department that do not complain about menial tasks.

But of course IaC is the way we must follow.

[cfors]

Building a dashboard by clickety/clacking around is not a menial task, consistency across dashboards is a a core unit of observability to ensure x-functional teams can discuss issues across a common language/viewpoint, which is only enforceable through a declarative dashboard syntax.

[INTPenis]

The question was regarding alerts, not dashboards. We obviously deploy dashboards from json.

But I'm not aware of any way to deploy notification channels, probably can do that now via API. But either way we need to deploy notification channels with webhooks and tokens so that part is done manually. And then the alerts is also done manually.

[Bad_CRC]

No alerts possible with dashboards and variables.