October 2025 Summaries

Geotab, an AI-based platform for fleet management, collaborated with Grafana Labs to enhance their monitoring systems through a focused hackathon, where six teams of engineers worked intensively over three days to improve in-house monitoring capabilities and explore new data visualization methods with Grafana. The event included educational sessions on efficient data structuring and querying, followed by hands-on development where teams experimented with different visualization tools and incorporated new data sources. The hackathon culminated in a competitive presentation where teams showcased their projects, with some focusing on refining existing dashboards and alerts, while others integrated innovative data displays or even embedded games. The event highlighted the importance of structured collaboration, clear objectives, and resource allocation in fostering creativity and problem-solving, resulting in significant workflow improvements and inspiring dashboard designs.

Prometheus native histograms have become generally available in Grafana Cloud, enhancing precision and ease of use for analyzing data distributions such as latency and duration. Initially announced in a public preview in May and adopted across various industries, these histograms now offer higher resolution and dynamic bucket adjustment compared to traditional ones, facilitating more precise data visualization without extensive manual configuration. Prometheus developers confirmed their stability during PromCon EU 2025, and Grafana has integrated these histograms with its Metrics Drilldown feature, allowing users to visualize data immediately without writing PromQL queries. The pricing structure, maintained from the public preview, charges based on active buckets, making it cost-effective for users. Future developments include Native Histogram Custom Buckets (NHCB) for lower costs and increased reliability, though they depend on the experimental Prometheus Remote-Write 2.0. Additionally, Grafana plans to integrate native histograms with its Cloud products to enhance user experience across its offerings.

Grafana's SQL expressions feature enhances its ability to provide a unified monitoring experience by allowing users to manipulate and combine data from various sources, such as Prometheus, MySQL, and Google Sheets, as if they were part of a single MySQL database. This feature, available in public preview across Grafana OSS, Enterprise, and Cloud, is versatile in its applications, enabling users to perform complex data analyses, generate alerts, and visualize trends without the need for a data warehouse. Additionally, with the integration of the Grafana LLM plugin, users can write SQL queries using natural language, receive AI-powered query assistance, and improve their SQL expressions' performance and reliability. The feature is powered by go-mysql-server from Dolthub, aligning with Grafana's technical stack, and plans for future enhancements include supporting more data sources and extending SQL expressions with custom functions.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, celebrating the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's 10th anniversary, will take place in Atlanta from November 10-13, with Grafana Labs as a silver sponsor. Grafana Labs will host multiple sessions featuring their team members, focusing on topics like OpenTelemetry's real-time validation tool, learning Kubernetes from scratch, and integrating Prometheus with OpenTelemetry. Key discussions will include practical insights into debugging Kubernetes clusters using OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation and understanding request duration measurement inaccuracies in application instrumentation. The event will also feature an introduction and deep dive into Prometheus, highlighting new features and encouraging community contributions. Attendees are invited to visit Grafana Labs' booth for swag and to meet with experts.

Grafana Cloud has introduced a feature called saved queries to streamline the process of writing and managing queries, enhancing collaboration and efficiency for engineering teams. This feature allows users to save, share, and reuse queries easily, which helps in onboarding new team members and ensures the use of consistent, well-crafted queries across the organization. Saved queries facilitate standardized observability methodologies like RED and USE frameworks, enable faster dashboard creation by accessing a library of pre-approved queries, and simplify the management of annotations for events like deployments. Additionally, they reduce the risk of costly mistakes by allowing query language experts to provide optimized queries for others to use safely. Users can save queries with titles, descriptions, and tags and choose between private or shared visibility, while saved queries can be accessed through a searchable list in the query editor. This feature is available in public preview for Grafana Cloud users and can be enabled in Grafana Enterprise, with plans for further enhancements based on user feedback.

Grafana and Grafana Cloud have announced their end-of-year release freeze dates to ensure system stability during the holiday season, with the freeze periods set for November 26 to December 2 and December 19 to January 5, allowing exceptions only for operational or security incidents. Grafana Cloud's rolling release channels—Fast, Steady, and Slow—facilitate the continuous delivery of updates, improvements, and security fixes, enabling users to choose their preferred update frequency. Fast updates occur daily, Steady updates are weekly, and Slow updates happen monthly, with flexibility for Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced users to switch channels for their production instances. This strategy ensures timely access to new features while maintaining rigorous testing protocols to minimize bugs, and any issues that arise are swiftly addressed. The release cadence is specific to the Grafana visualization platform, with other products like Grafana Cloud Logs, Metrics, and Traces updated separately, and users are encouraged to contact support for any queries during the freeze periods.

Grafana Tempo 2.9 introduces a range of new features and improvements, including MCP server support, TraceQL metrics sampling, and enhanced operational capabilities for multi-tenant environments. The release marks the inclusion of Model Context Protocol (MCP) server support, allowing large language models (LLMs) to securely connect to tracing data, facilitating easier service diagnostics and interaction analysis. Additionally, the update offers probabilistic sampling in TraceQL queries to speed up data retrieval, albeit with a tradeoff in accuracy, and includes new metrics for monitoring query I/O and span timestamp discrepancies. Operational enhancements improve trace performance visibility in multi-tenant settings, and new features in the cost-attribution usage tracker allow for more specific resource and span-level tracking. Looking ahead, Grafana is developing an experimental vParquet5 block format and a new architecture, Project Rhythm, aimed at scalability and reduced ownership costs. Users are encouraged to engage with the community through Grafana Labs channels and consider the free tier of Grafana Cloud for accessing Tempo.

Backbase, a global fintech leader, is leveraging Azure-powered Grafana to provide scalable observability solutions by provisioning dedicated Grafana stacks for each customer, enabling rapid onboarding through a fully automated Grafana Cloud integration embedded within its managed hosting solution. These production-ready stacks are deployed in minutes, featuring cloud provider integrations, Kubernetes cluster connectivity, and prebuilt dashboards, allowing customers to make faster decisions using queryless exploration capabilities and flexible pricing for custom metrics. Manu Chadha, Product Director, and Andrei Drumov, Principal System Engineer, emphasize that a strong post-sales partnership is cultivated through a shared culture of prioritizing customer feedback, continuous innovation, and communication, which drives the exploration of new Grafana Cloud capabilities and feedback for feature development.

GrafanaLive Singapore is hosting a full-day event at Google Singapore Mapletree Business City on September 19, 2023, offering hands-on training and expert-led sessions on using Grafana for observability metrics in areas like load testing, telemetry, and incident response. The event includes a paid morning workshop focused on introducing Grafana Observability, followed by a series of free afternoon sessions on topics such as implementing service level objectives (SLOs), integrating incident response tools, managing logging costs with Grafana Loki, and enhancing Grafana dashboards. Attendees will have the opportunity to network during lunch, participate in a live Q&A, and receive practical tips and tricks from Grafana Labs' technical experts. The event aims to provide a personalized and interactive experience, with limited capacity requiring early registration.

Building an observability stack often begins with logs due to their familiarity and ease of integration into existing workflows, but this approach can lead to scalability challenges and increased costs, especially in Grafana Cloud. While logs can quickly make an application observable, over-relying on them can result in operational and cost issues due to Grafana Cloud's fair use policies and the performance limitations of the Loki log aggregation system. To optimize observability, it is recommended to use metrics for efficient monitoring, employ recording rules to reduce query loads, and optimize log queries by filtering on indexed labels and narrowing time ranges. Logs remain essential for detailed investigations and compliance needs, but a balanced strategy that prioritizes metrics can enhance reliability and scalability. Grafana Cloud offers tools like the Loki query fair usage dashboard and built-in usage alerts to assist in managing these challenges and optimizing performance.

Chaos Engineering, a method for injecting controlled failures to enhance system reliability, can significantly improve monitoring and observability tools by helping to identify the right data and dashboards for effective incident response. In a session led by Jacob Plicque, a Senior Solutions Architect at Gremlin, the basics of Chaos Engineering are explored, highlighting how various companies have leveraged this approach to build confidence in their systems' functionality. Plicque, who has extensive experience in industries such as finance and e-commerce, discusses practical troubleshooting scenarios and improvements for dashboards, alongside showcasing new features in the latest Grafana release. The session emphasizes building hypotheses about system operations and validating them to create more robust platforms capable of withstanding high-traffic scenarios and severe conditions.

Jacob Straszynski is a Staff Engineer at Planet Labs, where his enthusiasm for toolsmithing has led him to specialize in Kubernetes and Observability. His interest in making computers perform enjoyable tasks dates back to his work on a Half-Life 1 mod in 1998. Beyond his technical career, Jacob enjoys crafting Neapolitan pizza and sourdough batard, climbing in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and wingfoiling on Lake Tahoe.

Grafana Labs has significantly improved the cost and performance of its fully managed Loki-as-a-service product by transitioning to Loki's new TSDB index, as discussed by contributors Kavi Kanagaraj and Travis Patterson. This update has resulted in faster query rendering in Grafana, reducing wait times for results. Travis Patterson, who also works on integrating external data into Grafana's Enterprise Plugins, engages with the community through local meetups and events like GrafanaCON, where participants can connect with developers and learn about the latest software releases, including Grafana 9.5, Loki 2.8, and Tempo 2.0.

Johanna Öjeling is a Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, where she focuses on Grafana Fleet Management to assist users in managing telemetry collectors on a large scale. With a background in distributed, data-intensive systems, she is enthusiastic about software quality, developer experience, and open source.

Grafana Pyroscope, an open-source continuous profiling project formed by merging Grafana Phlare and Pyroscope, aims to enhance developer experience by providing deeper system insights, facilitating issue resolution, and accelerating software delivery. Project leads highlighted improvements in performance, scalability, and profile collection usability, as well as flame graph visualization of profiling data in Grafana. Key contributors include Dmitry Filimonov and Ryan Perry, who transitioned from business to coding and co-founded Pyroscope, and Christian Simon, who leverages extensive Linux ecosystem experience to address modern observability challenges. GrafanaCON events offer opportunities for developers to engage with the community and explore updates like Grafana 9.5, Loki 2.8, and Tempo 2.0.

Bertrand Martin, the co-founder and CEO of Sentry Software, has led his company to become a significant entity in IT infrastructure observability, serving numerous enterprise clients globally. Over the past year, Martin has spearheaded the development of a software-only solution capable of measuring the electricity consumption and carbon footprint of data center IT equipment. In addition to his role at Sentry Software, he actively contributes to open source projects such as OpenTelemetry, Maven, and the Green Software Foundation. Known for his engaging public speaking, Martin frequently participates in IT conventions and conferences to advocate for sustainable IT innovations.

DFDS, a prominent pan-European shipping and logistics company, faced challenges in managing a complex technological environment that combined modern microservices with outdated systems, alongside increasing cybersecurity regulations. To enhance observability and streamline operations, DFDS adopted Grafana Cloud, a centralized platform that improved incident detection and resolution, reduced costs by eliminating redundant IT tools, and fostered better collaboration across teams. This adoption led to significant cost savings, accelerated incident resolution, and empowered the team through Grafana’s training resources, cultivating a culture of continuous improvement and proactive observability initiatives.

Grafana Labs hosted a webinar focused on cost management features within Grafana Cloud, aimed at helping SRE and platform teams reduce expenses without sacrificing observability. The session, led by Jen Villa, Director of Product at Grafana Labs, detailed how users can analyze, attribute, monitor, and optimize their metrics and logs usage to lower costs while maintaining a robust observability strategy. The webinar highlighted tools such as Grafana Mimir, Grafana Loki, and Prometheus, and encouraged participants to explore the Grafana Cloud free tier, offering a generous package of metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. The event underscored that effective cost management does not necessarily entail a compromise in the quality or extent of observability.

Raj Dutt, the CEO and Co-Founder of Grafana Labs, has a rich background in entrepreneurship and personal interests. During his college years, he founded Voxel, a cloud and hosting company that was later acquired by Internap in 2012. Dutt is deeply passionate about observability and aviation, having obtained his private pilot's license nearly two decades ago and completing a motorglider rating.

Dell Technologies addressed the complexity of its expansive observability tools by consolidating them with Grafana Cloud, as explained in a webinar featuring Brian Murphy, a Staff Site Reliability Engineer. The transition to Grafana Cloud was prompted by a restrictive renewal contract with their previous vendor, leading to the integration of the LGTM stack to unify data and enhance issue diagnosis and prevention for the company’s 13,000 engineers. Murphy detailed the implementation of Grafana Cloud’s features, such as smart alerts and centralized dashboards, which streamlined Dell's monitoring processes. The webinar also highlighted the use of Adaptive Metrics and provided resources for starting with Grafana Cloud's free tier.

The text provides an overview of professionals working across various organizations, highlighting their roles, expertise, and contributions to fields like observability, infrastructure engineering, and software development. Key figures include Hudson Ash, who oversees infrastructure at Clearco, Marc Chipouras and Joe Elliott from Grafana Labs focusing on observability tools, and Chris Featherstone and Sachin Garg from Adobe specializing in metrics and open standards. Additionally, contributors from companies like Just Eat Takeaway.com, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Banco Itaú are mentioned, each playing significant roles in enhancing their organizations' technological capabilities through innovative solutions and tools like Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and Kubernetes. The text also touches on personal interests and hobbies of these professionals outside their work environments.

In a webinar titled "ObservabilityCON on the Road," George Luong, Engineering Manager of Slack's Monitoring team, shared the company's evolution in monitoring practices since adopting Grafana in December 2015. The journey from using unintuitive dashboard systems to the current Grafana Enterprise-powered system highlights significant advancements, including integrating Grafana Alerting, which now powers 50% of all alerts at Slack, and adopting a dashboards-as-code approach. Additionally, Slack developed a Global Health Dashboard to proactively address issues before they impact users, ensuring continuous and seamless connections for millions of users. The webinar, which has concluded, offered insights into Slack's successful implementation of Grafana, benefiting everyone from developers to executives.

Uber, a global leader in transportation technology, has significantly enhanced its platform's efficiency and performance by adopting Grafana Cloud Profiles for automated, proactive profiling. Operating at a massive scale with over 5,000 microservices and 500,000+ weekly deployments, Uber faced challenges with performance bottlenecks and high infrastructure costs. Transitioning from reactive, manual profiling to continuous profiling with Pyroscope has enabled always-on, low-overhead monitoring and historical data analysis. This shift has not only democratized expert-level performance optimization across Uber's engineering teams but also resulted in substantial cost savings, such as identifying a 30% allocation overhead in a backend service that led to a 10,000-core reduction. Additionally, AI-powered profiling has streamlined incident resolution, allowing engineers to diagnose issues like memory leaks in just 30 minutes, which previously took days. With no visible overhead during its initial implementation, Uber plans to extend continuous profiling to all services by the end of 2025.

The Documentation Writers' Toolkit provides guidance on creating effective tutorials that facilitate learning by doing in a safe environment, emphasizing quick successes and limiting content to necessary tasks for achieving a specific goal. Tutorials should include a clear topic title, an overview of the objectives, and task sections that avoid excessive explanation, instead linking to additional resources when needed. The toolkit distinguishes between tutorials and task topics, highlighting that tutorials are designed for learning within a sandbox environment, while task topics focus on operational work. It also details the process of structuring, writing, and publishing tutorials within a project repository, ensuring they are accessible from the Grafana website's Tutorials page, and provides instructions on managing visibility in the table of contents to keep tutorials organized.

Jason Davis is a Distinguished Engineer in Cisco's Developer Relations team, where he focuses on establishing strategic relationships with customer developers, corporate product teams, and industry leaders. With a career that includes strategic and tactical consulting for numerous clients, he has spent the past 11 years contributing to the CiscoLive Network Operations Center (NOC). His work in the NOC involves utilizing and managing observability and management tools such as Grafana, InfluxDB, Kubernetes, and fping. In addition to his professional responsibilities, Davis enjoys experimenting with Raspberry Pi and ESP32 single-board computers.

Ozark Integrated Circuits Inc. installed ultraviolet detector modules on the International Space Station in January 2019, with live data collected from May 2019 until April 2020, when the project concluded with the return of the equipment via SpaceX's Dragon capsule. The project utilized a Grafana-based real-time information display system, and the results were presented by Matt Francis, the President and CEO of Ozark IC, who specializes in designing electronics for extreme environments. Founded in 2011, Ozark IC focuses on rugged electronics for aerospace and energy applications and employs open-source technology for its hardware and software design. Matt Francis has a diverse background in projects ranging from Venus exploration to developing controls for jet engines, and he actively participates in initiatives promoting open-source technology and STEM education for school children.

Recent developments in Grafana Loki have focused on enhancing the usability and operability of the log aggregation solution, with the introduction of features such as a simplified deployment mode, improvements to the Grafana log panel, configurable per-stream retention, an API for log stream deletion, and recording rules for generating metrics from logs. This session, led by Loki team members Ivana Huckova, Owen Diehl, and Trevor Whitney, aims to showcase these new capabilities. Huckova, a Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, works on improving data source reliability and usability, and enjoys creative observability projects. Diehl, a Principal Software Engineer, is a main maintainer of Loki, known for his Bulbasaur avatar. Whitney, a Staff Software Engineer, has extensive experience in the Observability field and contributes as a Loki maintainer.

Mateusz Kulewicz is a software engineer at Canonical, specializing in observability-focused projects. He is responsible for writing and maintaining charms within the Canonical Observability Stack. In his personal life, Mateusz enjoys exploring new hobbies every few months, particularly those related to travel or maps, and takes pleasure in traveling and learning various languages.

Owen Diehl is a principal software engineer at Grafana Labs, where he primarily contributes as a maintainer of the Loki project. His career includes leading engineering efforts at the startup Nutritionix. Despite his informal training, Owen has established a professional presence recognizable by his Bulbasaur avatar and maintains active profiles on platforms like GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

David Allen, from Grafana Labs, discusses the creation of a "Meeting Cost Calculator" dashboard built using Grafana, which humorously tracks the real-time cost of meetings. Originating from a Perl script developed during his time in a government organization, the dashboard calculates meeting costs by multiplying the number of attendees by their average hourly rate, presented in engaging visualizations. Users input the number of attendees and estimated hourly cost to see live updates on meeting expenses, and they can share this data with colleagues in real-time. The tool also includes a playful "Business Buzzword Bingo" feature to make meetings more enjoyable by allowing participants to mark off common corporate clichés they hear. Allen encourages users to explore and customize the dashboard in Grafana Play, a public sandbox, and to share their adaptations with the Grafana community.

In a shift from the traditional observability pillars of logs, metrics, and traces, the blog post advocates for a new approach using interconnected "rings" that enhance performance and reduce telemetry waste within Grafana Cloud. Emphasizing the integration of metrics, logs, and traces, the article describes how these elements, when combined with operational and technology best practices, form "opinionated observability" solutions that provide context-rich, cost-effective insights for faster issue resolution and operational efficiency. By leveraging automated processes and AI-powered tools, such as the Grafana Assistant and Knowledge Graph, Grafana Cloud delivers tailored observability solutions for Kubernetes, cloud providers, and application monitoring, ensuring teams can efficiently manage their systems without unnecessary complexity or data overload. The future of observability, as envisioned by Grafana Labs, is one where telemetry is seamlessly connected, enriched by best practices, and interpreted by AI, allowing organizations to understand and act on system insights with greater confidence.

SpotOn, a provider of point-of-sale systems and other restaurant management tools, emphasizes the importance of observability and reliability to ensure uninterrupted operations for its restaurant clients. To enhance these capabilities, SpotOn has integrated Grafana Assistant, an AI-powered agent, into its observability framework, allowing for improved problem-solving and faster onboarding of new engineers. This tool has enabled SpotOn to streamline troubleshooting processes, particularly in challenging environments like restaurant kitchens, and has increased internal adoption of observability practices by making it easier for non-experts to create dashboards and manage incidents. Grafana Assistant's context-aware AI features facilitate a more intuitive navigation of Grafana Cloud, helping teams quickly identify and address issues, ensuring minimal disruption to clients' operations, and allowing SpotOn to focus on customer outcomes rather than the intricacies of the underlying technology.

Grafana Cloud has introduced new features to help organizations manage and optimize observability costs as their strategies scale, addressing the challenge highlighted by surveys showing that cost is a top priority for many users. The Adaptive Telemetry suite intelligently classifies and prioritizes telemetry data to reduce costs by ensuring only valuable data is stored and used, with features like Adaptive Metrics, Logs, Traces, and Profiles. The Cost Management and Billing app offers centralized visibility into usage and spending, supporting FinOps strategies with transparency and accountability features. Additionally, the Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) option allows users to leverage existing cloud service provider discounts, while the adoption of the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) offers a standardized approach to cloud cost management. These tools, along with continuous profiling and Kubernetes cost monitoring, aim to optimize Grafana Cloud usage and reduce expenses.

The integration of GitLab CI/CD with Grafana through the lambda-gitlab-loki project offers a streamlined solution for enhancing observability in development environments by bridging GitLab webhooks with Grafana Cloud Logs, powered by Grafana Loki. This serverless, open-source project addresses the common issue of fragmented tooling, allowing real-time monitoring of CI/CD events, such as pipeline completions and deployments, to flow into Grafana as structured logs. This integration not only facilitates advanced alerting and trend analysis but also improves incident response and compliance reporting by enabling teams to correlate code changes with system performance effectively. Utilizing AWS Lambda for this integration ensures cost efficiency, zero infrastructure management, and built-in reliability, making it accessible for typical development teams. The project exemplifies the trend towards unified observability, allowing teams to gain a holistic understanding of their development processes and make data-driven decisions to enhance system reliability and responsiveness.

ObservabilityCON 2025 in London showcased numerous innovations and updates from Grafana Labs, focusing on enhancing Grafana Cloud's capabilities in observability and cost management. Key highlights include the integration of AI tools like Grafana Assistant, aimed at streamlining root cause analysis and reducing cognitive load for engineers. The event introduced Adaptive Telemetry features to optimize observability costs and unveiled Adaptive Traces and Adaptive Profiles to improve data value retention. Grafana Cloud's Knowledge Graph offers a unified view of system metrics, aiding faster root cause analysis, while the Service Center provides a comprehensive service-first view of system health. Grafana Federal Cloud, authorized for high-security environments, emphasizes secure, reliable monitoring solutions for U.S. government agencies. Upcoming features such as Database Observability and Instrumentation Hub promise further advancements. The event also celebrated partner collaborations with the inaugural Grafana Labs Partner Awards, recognizing significant contributions to the observability ecosystem.

Adaptive Telemetry in Grafana Cloud is a comprehensive suite designed to optimize observability data by ensuring only the most valuable metrics, logs, traces, and profiles are retained, thereby reducing costs and enhancing clarity. With features like Adaptive Metrics, Adaptive Logs, Adaptive Traces, and Adaptive Profiles, the suite employs intelligent classification and prioritization techniques to automatically recommend actions such as aggregating, sampling, or dropping low-value data. This approach helps organizations filter out noise and control costs while maintaining essential insights for monitoring and troubleshooting. At ObservabilityCON 2025, Grafana Cloud introduced new components like Adaptive Traces and Adaptive Profiles, which are designed to retain valuable traces and adjust profiling dynamically to maximize resource efficiency. The suite supports automated and flexible optimization, offering fine-grained control over data with customizable policies, anomaly detection, and a queryless investigative workflow through Grafana Traces Drilldown, ultimately providing an integrated solution for efficient and effective observability management.

Grafana's latest AI-powered tool, Grafana Assistant, is designed to streamline incident resolution and reduce alert fatigue by offering a context-aware, AI-driven approach to observability data. Embedded directly into Grafana Cloud, the Assistant acts as an AI co-pilot, helping users write and debug queries, build dashboards, and perform root cause analysis using natural language. A significant addition is Assistant Investigations, which accelerates multi-step incident investigations by analyzing metrics, logs, traces, and profiles to provide actionable recommendations for remediation. These features aim to enhance the user experience by reducing cognitive load on engineers, supporting non-observability teams with self-service access, and integrating seamlessly with existing workflows through tools like Slack. Grafana Labs emphasizes a "human-in-the-loop" approach to ensure engineers remain in control while benefiting from AI assistance, positioning these tools as transformative in simplifying and enhancing observability processes.

Observability has evolved from simple log and metric monitoring to a more mature framework that aligns IT practices with business outcomes, as evidenced by a Grafana Labs survey of 150 industry decision-makers. The findings indicate a shift from fragmented tool use to unified platforms that enhance operational efficiency and business value, with many organizations adopting unified observability platforms to break down silos and improve incident resolution. While tool consolidation remains a work in progress, the adoption of service level objectives (SLOs) is growing, with 86% of organizations implementing them for accountability and improved decision-making, though many still use them reactively. Additionally, AI is being explored to enhance observability by reducing alert fatigue and assisting in incident detection, although only a small fraction have deployed it in production. Ultimately, the goal is to leverage observability for measurable business impact, with a growing number of organizations recognizing its value beyond traditional metrics like uptime and incident frequency, thereby positioning observability as a strategic business driver.

Grafana Labs has created an innovative dashboard using Grafana Cloud to celebrate Taylor Swift's 12th studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl," by visualizing various aspects of her career. Leveraging Grafana Assistant, an AI-powered tool that simplifies dashboard creation, a team of Grafana enthusiasts has crafted a comprehensive dashboard with four tabs featuring Taylor's career milestones, musical analysis, tour data, and insights into her latest album. The dashboard, designed to be user-friendly for both experts and novices, includes elements such as a live countdown, dynamic data-driven charts, and thematic color schemes to represent different eras of Swift's career. By utilizing data from sources like Google BigQuery and a Kaggle dataset based on the Spotify API, the team has provided fans with visual insights into the evolution of Taylor's music, the impact of her global tours, and the details of her latest album, all while offering an engaging experience with an "Easter egg" feature within Grafana Assistant. This project highlights how Grafana Cloud's capabilities can be creatively applied beyond traditional data visualization, encouraging both Swifties and data enthusiasts to explore and utilize its features.

Grafana k6 browser is gaining traction as a key tool for frontend testing, providing insights into performance and user experience by collecting web vitals, capturing custom metrics, and simulating user actions. It maintains "rough compatibility" with Playwright, allowing users familiar with Playwright to easily transition their scripts to k6 with minimal modifications while benefiting from k6's focus on performance and synthetic testing. Though not aiming for full parity with Playwright, k6 selectively incorporates valuable APIs to simplify frontend testing, ensuring users can leverage modern best practices without unnecessary complexity. The platform offers cloud-scale browser testing capabilities through Grafana Cloud, integrating seamlessly with observability and performance testing infrastructure. Looking ahead, Grafana k6 aims to simplify frontend testing by abstracting complex browser model details and making tests accessible to a broader range of engineers, including those who are not frontend experts. The development team is committed to evolving the module based on community feedback, focusing on strategic API adoption and enhancing user accessibility while continuing to prioritize performance and synthetics testing.

Grafana Labs is conducting its fourth annual Observability Survey to gather insights into the rapidly evolving observability landscape, influenced by emerging standards and technologies such as agentic AI and vibe coding. The survey aims to be the largest community-driven assessment of the industry's state, encouraging participation from a broad range of roles and tools to reflect Grafana Labs' inclusive "big tent" philosophy. The results will guide Grafana Labs in developing tools that align with community needs and will be shared transparently, allowing for interaction through a Grafana dashboard. The survey addresses satisfaction with current practices, the role of AI, and the significance of open standards like OpenTelemetry. Participants have the chance to win Grafana-themed swag, including special packs and custom stickers, by entering a raffle or attending select in-person events. Responses are anonymous, and sharing the survey is encouraged to enhance collective understanding of the current state of observability.