Planet-scale Dashboards at Google with Grafana

Google monitors billions of apps across 190,000+ employees — and maintaining 100,000+ individual dashboards was simply impossible. This GrafanaCon session shows how Google solved dashboard sprawl at planet scale, and how Grafana is now building that same capability into its platform.

Google's Katia Giarda and Grafana Labs Principal Engineer Carl Bergquist explain how Google built an internal planet-scale dashboard system using reusable, parameterized dashboards — and one special filter dimension called scope. Grafana is now implementing Google's scopes concept: select a namespace, cluster, or service, and Grafana injects the right Prometheus label filters into every query at runtime, making a single expert-built dashboard serve every service in your org. The dashboard navigation list updates automatically based on what metrics actually exist within your selected scope — Go services see Go dashboards, Java services see Java dashboards — and your scope stays applied as you drill across related dashboards. Scope creation can be fully automated from metrics queries, so new services get scopes automatically and decommissioned ones are cleaned up via TTL. Ad-hoc filters, group-by variables, and drill-down improvements built from Google's feedback are all heading to open source.

0:00 Introduction
1:32 The Scenario: 3AM Alert, No Dashboard
2:14 The Vision: Instant Auto-Provisioned Dashboards
3:17 The Scale Problem: 100K Dashboards
4:41 Dimensions & Variables: The Reuse Solution
5:53 Introducing Scope: The Core Concept
7:21 Results: Reusable & Navigable Dashboards
8:48 Google x Grafana: Why the Partnership
11:09 Proof: Why Planet-Scale Systems Are Essential
12:01 Building Scopes in Grafana (Carl Bergquist)
14:38 Live Demo: Scopes in Action
17:54 Smart Navigation & Auto-Filtered Dashboards
20:29 When Scopes Fit Your Organization
21:23 Availability & Open Source Contributions

Links/resources:
Learn about GrafanaCON: https://www.grafana.com/grafanacon/?src=yt
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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