How the Python Software Foundation Uses Grafana to Protect Python Infrastructure

Jacob Coffee is the sole infrastructure engineer keeping Python's global infrastructure online — including PyPI, which handles nearly 5 billion package requests per day, more per second than Google Search. This is how the Python Software Foundation built a self-hosted observability stack with Grafana to give their entire community visibility, not just a few engineers.

The PSF had donated access to Datadog, Sentry, and PagerDuty — good tools, but locked behind doors that community members (PyCon organizers, PyLadies chapters, Python runtime developers) couldn't open. When something broke at 2am in Europe, the only option was to ping Jacob on Slack and wait. The solution: a self-hosted Loki, Mimir, Grafana, and Alloy stack running on Cabotage (PSF's own open-source Kubernetes PaaS), where each Kubernetes namespace maps to a Loki tenant — giving every community project isolated, automatic access to their own logs and metrics. The defining moment came when a PyLadies organizer self-diagnosed a 500 error, fixed a misconfigured environment variable, and deployed a fix at 2am without involving Jacob at all. Beyond operations, the Grafana dashboards gave the PSF concrete data to co-sign the "Open Infrastructure Is Not Free" statement alongside the Apache Foundation and Eclipse Foundation — and to show sponsors exactly what their donations enable.

0:00 Introduction: PSF and Python's Scale
1:19 PyPI's Surface Area: 5B Requests/Day
3:29 The Problem: Great Tools Nobody Could Share
6:38 Why Grafana: Building a Self-Hosted Stack
7:57 Cluster Architecture: Cabotage and the LGTM Stack
9:54 Metrics, Logs, and Cardinality Control
13:46 Multi-Tenant Access for Community Projects
15:12 The "Aha Moment": Community Self-Service in Action
16:34 From Bottleneck to Platform: Zero Vendor Lock-In
18:53 Observability as Advocacy: "Open Infrastructure Is Not Free"
20:13 Roadmap: Tempo, Public Dashboards, and More
21:19 Recap and Key Takeaways

Links/resources:
The PSF is hiring — infrastructure engineer and PyPI software engineer: python.org/jobs.
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

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