Grafana began as an open and composable platform for data visualization. Today, Grafana has evolved into an all-in-one observability platform, providing everything from infrastructure and application performance monitoring to load testing and incident response. As organizations extend their use of Grafana, efficient and secure authentication and authorization is essential.

In the previous blog post in this two-part series, we discussed the critical signals you need to monitor in your Kubernetes environment to ensure optimal resource provisioning. These signals include high CPU and memory utilization, frequent pod evictions, slow application performance, and other indicators that your resources are over- or under-provisioned. Monitoring these signals is essential for maintaining an efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally sustainable Kubernetes environment.

Organizations that run Kubernetes clusters in cloud native environments should do so in a way that’s both operationally efficient and cost effective. However, many organizations don’t prioritize cost optimization until it becomes a pressing need. This may be due to a directive from senior leadership, a significant scale-up or migration of Kubernetes clusters, or an unexpected surge in the cloud bill.

Whether they’re for synthetic monitoring, large-language models, or some other use case, Grafana application plugins are a fantastic way to enhance your overall Grafana experience. Data for these custom experiences can come from a variety of sources, including nested data sources. However, they can also come from third-party APIs, which usually require authentication to access.

Grafana Labs is happy to announce that we have partnered with Intigriti, a leading bug bounty platform, to expand our bug bounty program. This collaboration will enable us to work more effectively with security researchers from around the world in a scalable, sustainable way. Moving to a platform that handles initial triage will allow us to focus on valid reports and expand our scope, covering a wider range of Grafana Labs developed products and services.

Gerard van Engelen is a seasoned DevOps engineer who ensures the quality of products by drawing parallels between complex issues and simpler, everyday scenarios. This approach helps in delivering value, ensuring that products are not only built correctly but also offer the right functionalities. Ansible is popular with system administrators and DevOps professionals who use it for automating IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration.

One of the great powers of Grafana is the open source community behind it — a community that provides a breadth of ready-to-use dashboards, plugins, exporters, and instructions that make a million tasks easier. The sheer scale of it all means whatever you need probably already exists somewhere. To illustrate this, I want to share an example of how to use these tools as a base for building a comprehensive database monitoring solution.

Every time the platform engineering team at San Francisco-based startup Mux deploys new software, there are two must-have components: proper access controls and observability. But until recently, their observability stack left the team frustrated, reactive, and largely in maintenance mode.

We are excited to share a significant update for Grafana Pyroscope users and the broader open source community: the launch of Explore Profiles, a new application that makes it easier and faster to surface meaningful insights from your profiling data. Explore Profiles is a Grafana app plugin designed to integrate seamlessly with Grafana Pyroscope, the open source continuous profiling backend, providing a smooth, queryless experience to browse and analyze your profiling data.

In the fast-paced world of technology, change is constant — and nowhere is that more evident today than in the flood of new features and advancements involving large language models (LLMs). They power various applications, from chat bots to advanced copilots. And as these LLMs and applications become more sophisticated, it will be vital that they work well and reliably. This is where observability, with the help of OpenTelemetry (using OpenLIT), plays an essential role.

Whether it’s 3 in the morning and you’re trying to resolve an outage, or you’re testing a new feature and you need to resolve a recurring issue so you can move on to your next task: time is of the essence. Wouldn’t it be great if your observability tooling could direct you to your “aha” moment, without you needing to fumble with writing a query?

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of the latest and greatest updates for Grafana Cloud this month. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

By running performance tests continuously and automatically, you can identify and correct performance regressions as they occur. One way to do this is by integrating performance testing into your development process. In this step-by-step post, we explore how to do just that, using Grafana k6 and GitHub Actions. k6 is an open source load testing tool to test the performance of APIs, microservices, and websites.

It’s summertime in the Northern Hemisphere, and for many people that means it’s also travel season. But before you depart for your dream holiday, don’t forget the essentials: passport, suitcase, and … Grafana? That’s right. If you’re headed to a different country, odds are you’ll use a different currency when you get there. And you can use Grafana to track changes in the exchange rates so you can get the most bang for your buck.

At Grafana Labs we believe in shipping features early and often, and in recent years we’ve doubled down on that philosophy. We no longer wait for the yearly major release to give you access to the next big thing. Instead, we regularly make new features, bug fixes, and security patches available to our self-managing users (Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise) throughout the year.

Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) are the backbone of modern software delivery, but there’s still limited visibility into their processes. Here’s how that’s changing with OpenTelemetry (OTel), and why those changes are so exciting.

Michal Vaško is a DevOps engineer at cloudWerkstatt, with a passion for open source technology and a deep love for observability. While operations or platform teams have long relied on visibility into metrics to react swiftly, the idea of doing the same thing with logs was once just a dream. Thankfully, Grafana Loki has revolutionized the logging stack, giving you the same level of visibility with logs that you get with metrics.

At its core, observability is about helping humans understand and optimize complex systems. It enables engineering teams to ask questions on the fly, and to learn not only when something goes wrong but why. Observability also allows organizations to proactively identify and address performance issues — before their end users even have a chance to notice.

At Grafana Labs, our No. 1 approach when building AI/ML tools is to enable humans (a.k.a. all of us!) to understand complex systems. In other words, we want to make observability still human, but less complicated. (Our second use case? Making social media more fun.) We believe that AI/ML tools in observability should work towards minimizing toil and the need for everyone in your organization to have the same deep domain knowledge about your increasingly complex stack.

Denis Gontcharov is a data consultant who helps aluminum smelters break down data barriers. For the past five years, he has supported the aluminum industry with IT and data services as an independent consultant. Denis also works as a Developer Advocate at the United Manufacturing Hub. Jeremy Theocharis is co-founder and CTO at United Manufacturing Hub. He is an expert in industrial IoT with over seven years of experience leading large-scale IIoT projects in various industries.