July 2025 Summaries

Grafana 12.1 introduces a range of updates aimed at enhancing the management and functionality of Grafana instances. Key features include the Grafana Advisor, which automates health checks and provides recommendations for optimal system performance, and a redesigned alert rule list page that simplifies alert management through intuitive views and filtering options. The release also enhances data visualization capabilities with the introduction of trendlines and custom variable support in visualization actions, allowing for more dynamic data exploration. Additionally, the update includes improved authentication for Microsoft Azure users via Entra Workload Identity, support for Service Account Impersonation in BigQuery, and the ability to visualize LogicMonitor data. Grafana Labs emphasizes community engagement and offers a free tier on Grafana Cloud for users to experience these new features.

Alex Burnett shares his journey of creating a real-time aircraft tracking dashboard using Grafana, combining his passion for planes with his expertise as a Senior Solutions Architect at Grafana Labs. Leveraging an ADS-B receiver, a Raspberry Pi, and software-defined radio (SDR) technology, he collects aircraft data, which is then processed and visualized through Grafana's geomap panel. This setup enables him to monitor nearby aircraft in real time, using dynamic visualization features to display flight paths and other details. Burnett provides a detailed guide on the setup process, highlighting the simplicity and accessibility of the required hardware and software, along with the benefits of using Grafana Cloud Logs for data ingestion. He also shares his plans to expand his tracking projects to include trains, showcasing the versatility of Grafana for visualizing coordinate-based data.

ObservabilityCON 2025, Grafana Labs' premier observability event, will be held from October 7-9 in London, with registration now open and early bird pricing available. The event will feature hands-on workshops, keynotes, and technical sessions led by Grafana Labs experts and industry leaders, focusing on topics such as AI in observability, managing observability at scale, and open standards. Attendees will have opportunities to engage in interactive demos, network with peers, and learn practical strategies to enhance their observability practices. For those unable to attend the London event, ObservabilityCON will also be touring various cities, including São Paulo, Washington, D.C., Dallas, and Madrid, offering a one-day version of the conference.

Balancing security and observability, Grafana Cloud introduces an integration with Tailscale to enhance secure data querying from private networks. Through Private Data Source Connect (PDC), Grafana Cloud establishes secure connections between its instances and data sources within private networks, ensuring data privacy with encrypted traffic. The new integration with Tailscale, currently in private preview, allows users to create secure networks called tailnets, where Grafana Cloud can query data sources using ephemeral machines. This setup eliminates the need for opening endpoints to the public internet, reduces operational overhead by bypassing the need for PDC agents, and extends observability by leveraging Grafana Cloud’s advanced features without exposing Grafana servers online. Tailscale’s robust access control mechanisms ensure that only necessary endpoints are accessible, making this integration ideal for distributed teams and remote work. While this feature is initially available for non-production stacks, it promises to enhance the security and efficiency of monitoring internal infrastructure.

Grafana Cloud has introduced several updates and features to enhance its observability platform, including improvements in Kubernetes Monitoring and Fleet Management, as well as advancements in Adaptive Metrics. The updates in Kubernetes Monitoring allow users to transition seamlessly from monitoring to specific Amazon EC2 instances for performance insights and include GPU utilization panels for more detailed visibility. Fleet Management now supports AWS PrivateLink for secure VPC connections and features an automated process for cleaning up inactive collectors. Adaptive Metrics now includes an auto-apply feature that automatically implements cardinality optimization recommendations, streamlining cost savings and observability. Additionally, new dashboard and visualization features have been introduced, such as regression analysis transformation and custom variable support for more dynamic and interactive visualization actions. Enhanced custom currency formatting now offers precise financial data representation, and static options can be added for query variables to provide greater flexibility when querying data sources. These updates are part of Grafana Cloud's commitment to providing a comprehensive and user-friendly observability solution.

Grafana Labs is heavily investing in OpenTelemetry, an open-source project rapidly becoming a standard for vendor-neutral telemetry in observability, as highlighted during GrafanaCON 2025. The company's commitment to open source is evident in its contributions to OpenTelemetry, including the launch of Grafana Beyla, an eBPF-based instrumentation tool, now part of the OpenTelemetry project. OpenTelemetry's significance lies in its ability to allow developers to instrument applications once and use that data across various observability tools without re-instrumenting, promoting vendor neutrality and standardized data representation through Semantic Conventions. Grafana Labs is integrating OpenTelemetry into its products, such as Grafana Alloy, which combines OpenTelemetry and Prometheus for optimized telemetry collection and management. The compatibility between Prometheus and OpenTelemetry is also improving, with Prometheus 3.0 supporting native OpenTelemetry metrics, reflecting the significant overlap in their user communities. Grafana Labs continues to contribute to the OpenTelemetry community through SDK maintenance, Prometheus integration, and advancing projects like OpenTelemetry Profiling, Browser, and Mobile projects, aiming for comprehensive, automated observability.

Ruben Fernandez, a principal engineer at Dell Technologies, has won the 2025 Golden Grot Awards in the personal category for his innovative Grafana dashboard that monitors the International Space Station (ISS). This marks his second win, following his previous year's success with a dashboard designed for navigating his Atlanta commute. His latest creation offers a comprehensive and interactive platform that provides real-time data on the ISS's location, upcoming sighting opportunities, crew details, and spacecraft docking status. Ruben's passion for space, stemming from childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut, is reflected in his dashboard, which includes a live stream of the ISS and a widget that allows users to track the station's passing over specific locations. This tool not only appeals to space enthusiasts but also gives Ruben the sensation of being part of the space journey he has always dreamed of. A Grafana user for three years, Ruben's dedication to creating meaningful dashboards is recognized by the community and reflects his personal interests and professional expertise.

Grafana Labs has released security patches for multiple versions of Grafana, addressing two vulnerabilities: a high-severity cross-site scripting (XSS) issue (CVE-2025-6023) and a medium-severity open redirect issue (CVE-2025-6197). The XSS vulnerability, discovered through a bug bounty program, allows attackers to execute arbitrary JavaScript in users' browsers by exploiting client path traversal and open redirects, posing risks like session hijacking. This vulnerability affects users with Viewer permissions and could impact Grafana Cloud due to certain content security policy configurations. The open redirect vulnerability, also identified through the bug bounty program, can redirect users to malicious sites if they are part of multiple organizations within Grafana, though Grafana Cloud is unaffected. Affected users are encouraged to upgrade their Grafana instances to the patched versions or apply specified mitigations. The patches were coordinated with cloud providers under embargo, ensuring services like Amazon Managed Grafana and Azure Managed Grafana remain secure, and the vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed following a structured timeline with acknowledgments to the discoverers.

Snowflake has enhanced its data visualization capabilities within Grafana by introducing new features to monitor metrics and improve security. The Snowflake Enterprise data source for Grafana allows users to seamlessly integrate Snowflake's cloud-based data with Grafana dashboards, enabling quick insights by correlating data from multiple sources. Recent updates include the introduction of pre-built dashboards like Snowpark Metrics for monitoring Snowpark activities and a Logs dashboard for navigating log messages. Enhanced security features include key pair authentication, OAuth authentication, and Private Data Source Connect (PDC) for secure connections. Users can now customize session parameters and default queries to tailor their data visualization experience. These updates aim to provide a richer and more secure experience for users managing Snowflake metrics within Grafana.

Version 2.2.0 of the backend for the Kubernetes Monitoring solution in Grafana Cloud introduces significant enhancements to cluster observability through updated alert and recording rules. Supported by the kubernetes-mixin, the update improves alert accuracy and reduces noise by adding cluster labels to alerts, introducing new alert rules for common failure modes, and refining existing alerts for better performance. The update also removes misleading alerts to reduce false positives and implements more robust recording rules that ensure compatibility with different Prometheus versions and support all workload types. Highlighting a shift toward more stable metrics collection, the transition from the irate to a rate-based calculation for CPU usage is emphasized, reflecting the community's preference for accuracy and performance. These updates enhance monitoring capabilities for both small and large Kubernetes environments, promising improved visibility and control, and users are encouraged to explore the full changelog for technical details.

Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability offers a hosted service for real user monitoring (RUM) that provides insightful analytics into the user experience of web applications. By utilizing the Grafana Faro Web SDK, developers can gather and visualize performance metrics such as Core Web Vitals, logs, and error data to assess frontend performance. Core Web Vitals, developed by Google, are crucial for evaluating loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability, thereby guiding developers in optimizing user experiences. The metrics are presented in a user-friendly dashboard with color-coded indicators to show performance levels, helping developers to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. Core Web Vitals include Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP), each offering specific insights into different aspects of page performance. Grafana Cloud integrates these metrics into a continuous development cycle, encouraging teams to monitor, debug, and enhance frontend performance consistently through tools that support evaluation, debugging, and continuous monitoring within DevOps practices.

Microsoft engineers selected Grafana as a modern data visualization platform to create executive dashboards for tracking metrics, managing incidents, and providing real-time KPI updates. Despite Grafana's openness, extensibility, portability, and deep integration with Azure data sources, Microsoft encountered challenges with its authentication methods. To address this, they developed a "managed identity" authentication method, eliminating the need for credential management by identifying users based on who they are rather than what credentials they possess. This new method, based on the OAuth 2.0 specification, is designed to be adopted by other native identity providers within Grafana. Through this open-source contribution, Microsoft aimed to enhance security and ease of use, while fostering collaboration within the Grafana community. John Naizer, a Microsoft software engineer, emphasized the importance of building relationships and trust within the open-source community and encouraged others to contribute to Grafana by starting small and being persistent.

Grafana Labs has been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms for the second consecutive year, reflecting its commitment to an open and composable observability stack that offers flexibility and control. The company has been noted for its completeness of vision and its innovative contributions, particularly in cost optimization, as highlighted by Gartner's Critical Capabilities report where Grafana Labs ranked among the top vendors across several use cases. With over 25 million users and 5,000 customers, Grafana Labs' Adaptive Telemetry suite stands out for its ability to significantly reduce observability costs without compromising on visibility or performance. The company's strong involvement in open-source communities, including notable contributions to Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, reinforces its leadership in promoting interoperability and transparency within the industry. Customer feedback on platforms like Gartner Peer Insights has been overwhelmingly positive, with a 4.5 out of 5 rating and 91% of reviewers recommending Grafana Labs' products, highlighting the effectiveness and ease of use of their observability solutions.

Grafana Beyla, an open-source eBPF-based auto-instrumentation tool, enables application observability without modifying code, and when integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), it provides deep visibility into containerized workloads, especially when running on Amazon EC2. This integration, which is not supported on AWS Fargate due to the lack of eBPF support, involves configuring Beyla as a sidecar in an ECS task and utilizing Grafana Alloy, an OpenTelemetry collector, to send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud. By setting up an OpenTelemetry listener, telemetry data can be sent through port 4317 for GRPC or port 4318 for HTTP, with necessary configurations stored in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and appropriate IAM permissions granted. This setup allows Beyla to read process IDs from other containers and communicate with Alloy through a shared namespace, ultimately enhancing service reliability and developer productivity by simplifying application observability in modern cloud environments. The integration supports business agility and provides a scalable observability solution that can be monitored and optimized using Grafana Cloud's distributed tracing system, Grafana Tempo, offering a comprehensive platform for metrics, logs, and traces.

Grafana/otel-lgtm is a Docker image designed to streamline observability setups, enabling developers to deploy a complete OpenTelemetry stack in under five seconds. This tool integrates key components such as the OpenTelemetry Collector, Prometheus, Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo, and Grafana Pyroscope to handle metrics, logs, traces, and profiles, all visualized within Grafana dashboards. With its rapid startup time and ease of use, grafana/otel-lgtm has gained traction in the development and testing environments, attracting notable adopters and fostering community contributions. Recent updates have focused on reducing startup time and integrating profiling capabilities via Grafana Pyroscope, facilitating detailed performance analysis and optimization. While primarily aimed at development and demonstration purposes, Grafana Cloud offers a scalable solution for production use, supporting continuous enhancements to the grafana/otel-lgtm project and inviting contributions from the community.

Electronic Arts (EA) employs strategic monitoring of its app using Grafana dashboards to effectively track over 200 core metrics, a task that was previously overwhelming due to the app's monolithic design and the multitude of event emissions. EA Software Engineer Kenny Chen developed a "functional dashboard" system that allows developers to review these metrics quickly, significantly reducing the time needed for comprehensive monitoring. This system incorporates status history panels that use color-coding to visualize data, enabling the team to easily detect patterns and issues, such as regressions or external outages. By setting effective thresholds based on normal distribution principles, EA has improved its ability to identify and address critical errors related to code changes. The functional dashboards are dynamic, allowing developers to access specific data by using URLs with parameters, which facilitates more targeted troubleshooting. This approach has enhanced EA's monitoring capabilities, ensuring they have not missed any critical bugs and allowing for continuous improvement with automated updates and alerts.

InfluxDB 3 Core is a significant update to the popular time series database, designed to enhance speed and simplicity, as explained by Paul Dix, Co-founder and CTO of InfluxData, during GrafanaCON 2025. This new version addresses long-standing user requests by introducing features such as unlimited cardinality, SQL support, and the separation of compute and storage, achieved through a comprehensive rewrite from Go to Rust. InfluxDB 3 Core simplifies the user experience with a one-command installation and enables advanced data processing with an embedded Python engine, while its diskless architecture allows for cost-effective, durable storage solutions. The database caters to diverse use cases, from server network monitoring to sensor data across various industries, distinguishing itself by supporting multiple column types and schema-on-write capabilities.

Grafana Labs released critical security updates for the Grafana Image Renderer plugin and Synthetic Monitoring Agent to address four severe vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-5959, CVE-2025-6554, CVE-2025-6191, and CVE-2025-6192) found in the Chromium library, which could allow remote code execution. Users of these tools are urged to update to the latest versions, Grafana Image Renderer 3.12.9 and Synthetic Monitoring Agent 0.38.3, to mitigate these risks. The company coordinated with cloud providers, including Azure Managed Grafana, to ensure security across platforms. Using the CVSS 3.1 methodology, the vulnerabilities were rated as critical, though NIST has not yet assigned a score. Grafana Labs provides detailed instructions for updating and encourages users to report any security issues through their established channels, while maintaining a security-focused blog for updates and acknowledgments.

Glovo, a subsidiary of Delivery Hero operating in 23 countries, uses Grafana's Traces Drilldown to improve their incident response and root cause analysis in distributed systems. Tracing provides a crucial visualization of request flows, highlighting bottlenecks and dependencies in complex microservice architectures. During a recent incident involving cascading failures, engineers at Glovo utilized Traces Drilldown to efficiently identify and resolve the issue, which stemmed from a rate-limited product catalog API affecting checkout processes. This tool enabled them to filter and analyze traces without complex queries, leading to a quick resolution and preventing further disruptions. Traces Drilldown has since become integral to their Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) workflows, allowing for more effective identification and troubleshooting of errors and latency issues.