“You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on.” ~ Heraclitus

I stumbled upon that analogy some time back, and I think it’s a good way of talking about change. For me, joining the Solutions Engineering team at Grafana is a continuation of embracing change and enjoying my professional journey. As I look back over my first several months here, I wanted to share some of my journey and a few thoughts on what I’m most looking forward to.

How My Journey Started

• I’ve been running metrics since the days of Perl scripts and RRD Graphs (Hats off to Cacti). I started in Enterprise IT when I worked at Citigroup and started accelerating with building a fantastic APM team using BMC Patrol and Precise APM.
• Opportunity to launch my Sales Engineering career by joining HP Software with solutions from their Mercury Interactive acquisition with HP Business Service Management.
• Some time with BMC Software with their ITSM and Cloud solutions. (Always Remedy Green!)
• Last three years deep into APM with Cisco AppDynamics.
• This led to the opportunity to join Grafana Labs this year and help drive the adoption of Grafana’s Observability Stack of metrics, logs, and tracing.

Since Arriving At Grafana

Everybody at Grafana deeply believes that data and its visualization should be easy to use, understand, and act upon by all. As an open-source software startup company, Grafana delivers on sharing opening and transparently.

Our team is the most energized, thoughtful, and empowered stewards of “All Things Grafana.” But it extends beyond our namesake. It’s compelling open-source solutions to big problems facing today’s Observability efforts, and we lead our community and customers with consultative guidance on solving real visibility issues.

We Love Visualizing Data!!

I published a quick video showcasing some of the Grafana Dashboards I built along my Journey Into Grafana. (With a great excuse to write some new music as well!!) The dashboards include:

• IoT Temperature Sensors
• Real-Time Energy Usage
• Pi-hole DNS Sinkhole
• Financial Markets
• Per IP Internet Bandwidth Usage
• NTP Offset
• Loki Metrics From Logs (Thanks Ward!!)
• Synthetic Blackbox Monitoring

(I’ll publish some follow-up blog posts on these dashboards and data exporters shortly…)

What Does the Future of Grafana Look Like?

First, it’s the continuing acceleration of compelling and valuable adoption across all our solutions, Grafana, Loki, and our recently released Tempo. Grafana releases every few months, and I can tell you that we cover all parts of our community open-source platforms and our Enterprise products.

Cloud-native is accelerating at a ferocious pace. That means delivering platforms that scale to collect and visualize high velocity, fine-grained observability that is a critical underpinning for everything we do. It’s about thinking differently and having diverse and inclusive relationships with our teams, community, and customers.

Growth. My journey to Grafana was based on great culture and the ability to deliver amazing and collaborative outcomes across our organization personally. From Engineering and Marketing to Sales and Solutions Engineering – Grafana has incredible opportunities for great candidates worldwide. Please reach out and be part of our great team!

Thanks!

I’m fortunate to have many great friends, family, colleagues, and customers who have joined me along my incredible journey. I look forward to sharing with the community what makes Grafana such a respected and loved solution.