Michele Mancioppi is a product manager at Canonical with responsibility for observability and Java. He is the architect of the new system of Charmed Operators for observability known as LMA2. Jon Seager is an engineering director at Canonical with responsibility for Juju, the Charmed Operator Framework, and a number of Charmed Operator development teams which operate across different software flavors including observability, data platform, MLOps, identity, and more.

Developers around the world get their news from Changelog, an indie media company on a mission to create inspiring content for software developers. Through their popular podcasts, including The Changelog, Go Time, JS Party, and Ship It!, the team at Changelog helps listeners stay up-to-date on the latest happenings, trends, and tools in a constantly evolving industry.

Here at Grafana Labs, we’re constantly shipping new features to help our users get the most out of Grafana Cloud. To help our new and existing customers learn about the latest and greatest, here’s a roundup of all the new features and improvements you should know about to make the most of Grafana Cloud.

Prometheus is the industry standard in cloud native metric monitoring with hundreds of thousands of installations, millions of users, and billions in market value. Speaking as a member of the Prometheus team, we have seen the project become a victim of its own success. While most people may be using Prometheus, not everybody is following the same operating standards.

Here at Grafana Labs, when we’re building integrations for Grafana Cloud, we’re often thinking about how to help users get started on their observability journeys. We like to focus some of our attention on the different technologies you might come across along the way. That way, we can share our tips on the best ways to interact with them while you’re using Grafana products.

On Oct. 5, we hosted the first Grafana Virtual Meetup for an EMEA-based audience. Each Grafana meetup features “bite-sized” presentations from our user community and members of the Grafana Labs team. We want to provide opportunities (even virtually!) for members of our community to connect with one another and share what they’re working on or have learned.

At GrafanaCONline in June, we talked about the future of machine learning at Grafana Labs. Four months later, we are excited to introduce Grafana Machine Learning for Grafana Cloud, with our metrics forecasting capability. It’s available now to all customers on Pro or Advanced plans. If you’re not already using Grafana Cloud, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial of Grafana Cloud Pro here.

Production readiness review (PRR) is a process that originated at Google, described as the first step of site reliability engineering engagement in the company’s famous SRE book. The idea of thoroughly reviewing a product before handing over the pager is a really good one, but except for Google-scale companies, there aren’t that many organizations that can afford dedicated SRE teams.

Grafana 8.2 was released last week, and we’re excited to announce one of its new features: contact point testing. Now users of Grafana 8 alerting can test their contact points right from the contact points page. This feature makes it easier to configure Grafana 8 alerting and gives you the confidence in knowing that your contact points are working as expected before they fire. Here are the basics.

Grafana 8.2 is here! This release marks the start of our work focused on measurable improvements to Grafana’s accessibility — part of our continuing mission to democratize metrics for everyone. The initial changes to Grafana in 8.2 are focused on navigation, with more to come. We’ll be sharing more about our accessibility roadmap in an upcoming blog post.