Actian & Grafana Cloud: The Search for a Customizable Observability Tool
summary
Actian moves from many vendors to Grafana Cloud starting April 2022, consolidating logs and metrics into Loki and Mimir and replacing multiple collectors with a single agent approach; initial static-mode Helm/Ansible/Harness automation proves tedious so the team switches to agent flow mode with Argo CD and official Helm charts and sees it work reliably. The estate spans 70+ clusters across three clouds with EU/non-EU GDPR stacks, uses k6 open source for browser synthetics, converts dashboards and alerts to code (Grafonnet/Jsonnet/Terraform), and records a dramatic cost reduction while tackling Git throttling, OOM sizing, and alert-to-metric conversions.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:57Actian and data solutions
- 3:52Observability challenges
- 5:00Transition to Grafana Cloud
- 7:20Grafana Agent static mode limits
- 9:12Adopting Grafana Agent Flow
- 11:06Synthetic monitoring with k6
- 12:49Grafana as code
- 14:58OnCall and incident response
- 16:00Lessons learned and improvements
- 17:32Log alerting challenges
- 18:15Cost reduction and Adaptive Metrics
- 19:40Single pane of glass
- 20:50Dev to prod observability
- 21:12Summary
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