September 2025 Summaries

Continuous profiling is emerging as a critical component of observability alongside traditional tools like logs, metrics, and traces, offering deep insights into resource usage and performance at the code level. Ryan Perry, a founder of Grafana Pyroscope, emphasized its value during a GrafanaCON 2025 presentation, highlighting its ability to enhance system performance, reduce costs, and proactively identify bottlenecks. Profiling, particularly when used with Grafana's Profiles Drilldown, can optimize the return on investment by improving throughput and user experience while minimizing resource expenses. Companies like Uber and Shopify have successfully implemented continuous profiling to achieve significant cost savings and infrastructure efficiencies. Perry underscored that profiling is distinct in its ability to optimize both the value received from data and the associated costs, offering a low-overhead solution that provides visibility into resource allocation and potential inefficiencies. By integrating profiling with other observability tools, organizations can comprehensively address system performance and cost challenges.

In his blog post, Simon Prickett shares his experience of integrating the CheerLights IoT project with Grafana Cloud to create a dynamic dashboard that visualizes the current and historical states of CheerLights, a global network of synchronized light installations. Utilizing the Infinity data source plugin, Simon efficiently pulls data from a JSON API, allowing for the visualization of CheerLights data without requiring a database. The dashboard includes various panels, such as a table displaying recent color changes, a stat panel highlighting the current color, and bar charts analyzing color popularity and update frequency. Throughout the process, Simon demonstrates how Grafana Cloud's transformation capabilities can be leveraged to generate insights from IoT data, illustrating the platform's versatility in handling data beyond traditional databases. The dashboard is available on Grafana Play for public exploration, and Simon invites readers to follow his ongoing IoT projects with Grafana Cloud, highlighting its user-friendly interface and generous free tier.

Unified observability practices are becoming crucial as technological environments grow more complex, according to Grafana Labs Co-founder Anthony Woods during a discussion on the "Tech Keys by Mercari India" podcast. He highlighted the shift from traditional monitoring to observability, which involves using telemetry data for insights and troubleshooting, driven by the adoption of microservices. Woods noted the increasing trend of executive interest in observability systems, emphasizing the importance of balancing cost and value and the role of open standards like OpenTelemetry in offering vendor flexibility. The conversation also touched on the integration of AI in observability, exemplified by Grafana's new AI-driven features designed to streamline incident management and diagnostics, showcasing the evolving landscape of observability tools and practices.

Grafana 12.2 introduces a range of new features aimed at enhancing data visualization and analysis, making it easier for users to transition from data to actionable insights. Key updates include the public preview of LLM-powered SQL expressions, which allow for intuitive data transformations using natural language and SQL syntax, and advanced table visualization features that improve performance and flexibility. The release also enhances the canvas visualization with improved pan and zoom capabilities, and offers greater control over connections and tooltips. Ad hoc filter support has been expanded to work with SQL data sources, enabling more efficient data exploration. Additionally, the update includes simplified reporting with a user-friendly one-page form, the introduction of a Jenkins Enterprise data source for visualizing software development metrics, and enhanced authentication options for the Infinity data source. Users can save, reuse, and share queries, streamlining the workflow across organizations. These innovations are complemented by Grafana's continued commitment to community engagement and user feedback, ensuring ongoing improvements and usability enhancements.

Grafana Alerting offers two main features to manage alert notifications: mute timings and silences, helping users mitigate alert fatigue. Mute timings are designed for recurring, scheduled suppression of notifications during predictable periods such as maintenance windows, allowing users to define specific intervals on a set schedule. In contrast, silences are used for one-time suppression of alerts, suitable for temporary situations like unexpected operational events, and are configured with specific start and end times. Both features enhance alert management by allowing teams to focus on critical tasks without being overwhelmed by notifications, with mute timings automating routine suppression and silences offering flexibility for unforeseen incidents. These tools are integral to creating an efficient alerting environment in Grafana, with detailed setup instructions available in the platform's documentation.

Grafana Cloud's Synthetic Monitoring provides real-time DNS monitoring capabilities to help prevent application failures due to domain name resolution issues. This system allows users to proactively verify that domains resolve to the correct IP addresses and measure the speed of these resolutions, thereby identifying potential DNS-related performance problems before they affect users. By setting up DNS checks, users can monitor network performance, detect security threats such as DDoS attacks, and ensure consistent DNS performance across global locations. The process involves creating a Grafana Cloud account, navigating to Synthetic Monitoring, and configuring DNS checks, including setting request targets, timeout periods, probe locations, test frequencies, and alerts. Once configured, Grafana Cloud offers real-time data visualization through preconfigured dashboards that provide insights into key metrics like uptime, latency, and reachability. The platform's free tier includes a generous allotment of test executions, making it accessible for users to implement and manage DNS checks effectively.

Grafana Cloud offers flexibility in choosing between single-tenant and multi-tenant architectures, each with its pros and cons, to suit different organizational needs. A single-stack approach, recommended for most users, leverages role-based access control (RBAC) and label-based access control (LBAC) for centralized management, simplified maintenance, and easier integration, though it may pose risks of misconfiguration and limited granularity in permissions. In contrast, a multi-tenant architecture provides complete isolation, better performance, cost attribution, and customizability, making it ideal for managed service providers and regulated environments, despite challenges in cross-tenant querying and maintaining consistency. The choice between these approaches should be guided by an organization's priorities concerning isolation, collaboration, compliance, and administrative overhead, with Grafana Cloud supporting both options through its robust features and generous free tier.

Grafana Mimir has introduced the Mimir Query Engine (MQE) as a solution to address the high memory consumption issues experienced with the Prometheus PromQL engine in its time series database. As of Grafana Mimir 2.17, MQE is the default query engine and is designed to offer faster and more memory-efficient performance by processing queries in a streaming manner, only loading data into memory as needed, rather than all at once. This approach significantly reduces memory fluctuations and improves query execution speeds, while maintaining 100% compatibility with PromQL features, allowing all existing queries and dashboards to function seamlessly. MQE's enhancements include memory-efficient techniques like time splitting, sharding, and chunks streaming, which optimize memory use across queries. Testing for correctness has been thorough, ensuring MQE's results match those from Prometheus' engine through unit tests and staged parallel query paths. The introduction of MQE marks an important step in improving the scalability and reliability of Grafana Mimir, with a focus on better handling large-scale data queries while maintaining accurate and consistent results.

Grafana k6 Operator, an open-source project for distributed performance testing within Kubernetes environments, has reached its milestone 1.0 release, offering simplified management and scaling of k6 tests. Initially an experiment by Simon Aronsson in 2020, it has evolved into a significant tool for executing and managing performance tests, utilizing Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to facilitate test runs and synchronize across multiple machines without compromising security. The community-driven project has seen substantial contributions, addressing challenges like idempotency and usability improvements, including support for modern installation methods and Helm charts. The 1.0 release focuses on improved versioning, maintenance updates, and a more predictable release schedule, with a commitment to Semantic Versioning for greater stability. These changes ensure k6 Operator adapts to the evolving Kubernetes ecosystem while maintaining a user-first approach, with regular updates and community engagement continuing to shape its development.

Companies often need to synchronize data across platforms, and the integration of ServiceNow with Grafana Cloud IRM provides a solution for managing incidents more effectively. By setting up webhooks that support incident events, users can automate workflows and trigger requests based on specific lifecycle events of incidents, such as when they are declared or resolved. The integration allows for bidirectional status synchronization between IRM incidents and ServiceNow incidents, which involves customizing webhook requests, using templated URLs, and managing configurations with Terraform. This setup supports advanced features like dynamic referencing of incident data and execution detail viewing, enhancing the flexibility of incident management. The integration also involves creating a ServiceNow business rule that updates IRM incidents when ServiceNow incidents change, ensuring both systems remain in sync. This flexible webhook setup allows for various integrations with other services, such as ChatOps platforms, and encourages users to explore the possibilities offered by Grafana Cloud IRM.

HackUPC 2025, one of Europe's largest student hackathons, took place at BarcelonaTech and featured over 700 tech students who engaged in a 36-hour challenge to create projects focused on sustainability, supported by Grafana Labs. Grafana Labs, a sponsor and mentor at the event, encouraged participants to use its platform to raise awareness of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among the projects highlighted were Graf-Anna, which utilized data visualization to illustrate the impact of industrial development and climate change on health and the environment; the Peaceful Protest Tracker, which visualized protest dynamics in real-time, focusing on sustainable development and accountable institutions; and Musigrafs, a project that showcased global music trends to aid aspiring musicians. These projects exemplified the students' creativity and storytelling prowess through data, demonstrating the potential of Grafana as a tool for impactful data-driven narratives. The event was a testament to the participants' ability to quickly learn and adapt complex technologies, reflecting the essence of hackathons as platforms for innovation and learning.

Grafana Labs has introduced Grafana Assistant, an AI-powered tool in Grafana Cloud designed to streamline data querying, troubleshooting, and dashboard management. This AI tool is particularly beneficial for developers, aiding them in debugging, understanding complex logs, and constructing queries using natural language, which significantly reduces the time spent on these tasks. It also facilitates onboarding for new users by providing interactive, contextual guidance. Grafana Assistant is integrated into Grafana Cloud, allowing users to leverage AI without additional installations, and it supports a human-in-the-loop interaction to ensure transparency and trust in its recommendations. While it is not open-source like some other Grafana tools, it represents a strategic move to enhance user experience by integrating AI into observability workflows, focusing on explainable and assistive AI that complements human decision-making.

Grafana Labs has introduced a new filtering experience for Grafana Alerting aimed at enhancing user interaction with alert rules, addressing previous limitations such as screen space clutter and lack of filtering options. The update features a cleaner UI with filters moved into a popup and offers more granular filtering criteria, including Namespace, Label, Evaluation group, and Rule Source, facilitating a more intuitive user experience. This new system also retains the manual search field for user preference and lays the foundation for future advanced search features like saved searches. Already being implemented in Grafana Cloud, this feature will be generally available in the Grafana 12.3 release, providing users with an efficient and less cumbersome way to manage alert rules.

Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring offers a robust solution for proactively monitoring the performance of critical applications globally, with a focus on TCP checks to detect connection failures and network issues that may impact user experience. TCP checks are particularly beneficial for monitoring database connections, mail server accessibility, FTP server file transfers, and message queue connectivity by testing connections on specific ports and measuring service availability and performance. The process of setting up a TCP check in Grafana Cloud involves creating an account, navigating to Synthetic Monitoring, selecting a check type, configuring request targets, setting timeouts, adding labels, choosing probe locations, determining test frequency, and configuring alerts. These checks provide real-time monitoring, security insights, and global validation, with results visualized through a preconfigured dashboard that updates continuously to ensure reliable service performance. Grafana Cloud offers a generous free tier to encourage users to leverage its synthetic monitoring capabilities.

In an effort to streamline access management and foster collaboration within Grafana, the article outlines a strategy for organizing multiple teams within a single Grafana Cloud stack, using roles, teams, and folders. The approach aims to reduce setup complexity and maintenance by centralizing dashboards, data sources, and permissions, while ensuring that each team retains autonomy over their workspaces. The method involves creating a unified environment where teams can share and learn from each other's dashboards, yet maintain secure and organized access through designated roles and label-based access controls. Non-folder resources such as service accounts and alert contact points are managed at the stack level, with roles carefully assigned to balance empowerment and security. The implementation is further streamlined through automation tools like Terraform and SCIM, allowing for seamless integration with identity providers such as Okta, which simplifies onboarding and role assignment. This model aims to maximize Grafana's potential by enabling teams to collaborate effectively, build on shared insights, and maintain secure data handling practices.

Faced with a cumbersome and inefficient release process, Grafana Labs adopted the concept of "tiger teams" to address urgent, cross-functional challenges swiftly and effectively. Originating from NASA's Apollo 13 mission, tiger teams are temporary groups of specialists brought together to tackle high-priority issues that do not fit neatly within existing team structures. At Grafana, these teams have successfully streamlined the software release cycle by reducing manual steps and improving efficiency, with the initial Release Tiger Team serving as a significant turning point. The success of these teams has led to the formation of a dedicated unit responsible for ongoing improvements, and the approach has been used to secure major partnerships and explore new business opportunities. The use of tiger teams highlights the importance of clear goals, strategic planning, and having the right people in place to drive focused, impactful change within an organization.

The Infinity data source for Grafana, a versatile tool for querying and visualizing data from various endpoints, has introduced significant updates to enhance its functionality and usability. Notable improvements include the addition of JQ parser support for more approachable JSON transformations, expanded HTTP methods like PATCH, PUT, and DELETE for greater API interaction flexibility, and the ability to customize OAuth2 tokens and pass metadata securely to APIs. Furthermore, the update includes gzip compression for better dashboard performance and defaults to the backend parser to improve compatibility with Grafana's backend features. A critical security update has also been made to address a Server-Side Request Forgery vulnerability, urging all users to upgrade to the latest version for improved safety and functionality.

A new method for ingesting AWS metrics into Grafana Cloud offers a more cost-effective, easier, and accurate solution by integrating Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Data Firehose for near real-time streaming. This push-based approach, using CloudWatch Metric Streams, is at least five times more cost-effective than traditional pull-based methods due to reduced operational costs and less reliance on API calls. The integration allows metrics to be processed and alerted on promptly, with higher granularity and the ability to enrich metrics with AWS resource metadata. The new method can coexist with the older scrape job setup, allowing gradual migration and ensuring continuous functionality of dashboards and alerts. Future enhancements are planned to further customize the metrics ingest experience, and the solution has expanded its observability offerings to other cloud providers like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Grafana Cloud aims to simplify the monitoring process with a range of plans, including a free tier.

Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability provides developers with real-time insights into the end-user experience of web applications by utilizing performance data collected through the Grafana Faro Web SDK. This service features pre-built dashboards that offer a comprehensive view of frontend performance, including sections for page loads, page performance, sessions, errors, and HTTP requests. These dashboards use intuitive color coding to indicate performance levels, and offer detailed insights such as Core Web Vitals, error metrics, and session data, which help developers prioritize optimization efforts and streamline the debugging process. Additionally, customizable filters allow for targeted analysis, enabling developers to slice data by app environments, versions, or user segments. This framework is part of Grafana Cloud's suite of tools, which offers a flexible and user-friendly approach to monitoring metrics, logs, and traces, with a generous free tier to support diverse use cases.