Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Beep boop: How to visualize Grafana Cloud IRM alerts in the real world

You know the situation: You're in a meeting and your alerts start to go off, but no one on the other side of the camera knows why you have to abruptly drop from the call. What if, instead, you had a robot in the background of your Zoom meeting that started to blink when those same alerts went off? You could just point to it, type in the chat "I have to drop," and off you'd go.

Shorten your 'inner loop' as a new hire and get past imposter syndrome with Grafana Assistant

Let's talk about being new. Four months ago, I joined Grafana Labs as a senior solutions engineer. It wasn’t just a new company, it was a new industry. I came from the visual workspace provider Miro, where I was comfortable doing discovery and talking about visual collaboration and innovation. But stepping into observability? I was in the deep end. And let me tell you, the imposter syndrome was real. Everyone around me was fluent in this language of metrics, logs, and traces.

What is high cardinality, and is it as scary as people make it out to be?

Dawid Dębowski is a software engineer at G2A.COM and a Grafana Champion. Holding an MS of Computer Science, Dawid’s main fields of interest related to observability are PromQL and data visualizations using Grafana. If you’ve ever worked with custom metrics in a Prometheus environment, you've probably heard about something called "high cardinality"—or at least I hope you have.

How to perform HTTP checks in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring

Your users should not be the first to know when your application goes down. When HTTP endpoints fail or respond sluggishly, users experience timeouts, connection errors, and degraded performance — often without clear indication of the root cause. This is where HTTP checks in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring come in, allowing you to proactively monitor your endpoints, verify they're online, measure response times, and ensure they're returning the correct status codes.

Grafana community dashboards: Memorable use cases of 2025

Every year, Grafana dashboards surface in new corners of the world. And this year, they even reached beyond this world—helping one team land on the moon and another monitor the planet’s health with orbiting satellites. Meanwhile, back here on Earth, the community used Grafana to track everything from wind turbines and wastewater to March Madness and Taylor Swift’s worldwide tour. Here’s a look back at some of the most memorable Grafana community dashboards of 2025.

Get started with Grafana Alerting: Link alerts to visualizations

In this tutorial you will learn how to link alert rules to time series panels for better visualization. Don't miss the rest of the "Get started with Grafana Alerting" series! Each part dives into a different feature to help you get the most out of alerting in Grafana.

How to share and analyze survey data (or other business metrics) in Grafana

Our annual Observability Survey provides some great insights on the state of industry and all things observability. And for the third edition of the survey, published last March, we wanted to bring the results into a Grafana dashboard—not just because we could, but because it was quite a nice way to interact with the data. After all, Grafana isn't just for IT observability. You can use it to monitor everything from BI data to lunar landings to pet pythons—and now, survey data.

Tail sampling vs. head sampling in distributed tracing

In this video, Grafana Labs' Robin Gustafsson (CEO for K6 + VP, Product) and Sean Porter (Distinguished Engineer) discuss the differences between head sampling and tail sampling approaches in distributed tracing. They explore why head sampling often amounts to sampling randomly and hoping for the best, while tail sampling — the approach used by Adaptive Traces in Grafana Cloud — allows you to intelligently capture the traces that actually matter to you.

Logging Best Practices (Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Call)

We’re back with a new Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Call episode, and this time we’re diving into logging with OpenTelemetry and Grafana Loki! Even better, we’re joined by two fantastic guests: Jack Berg, OTel logging expert, and Ed Welch, Loki guru. Getting both of them in one conversation makes for an amazing deep-dive into all things logging. Logs come in every shape and size, from simple CLI output to massive distributed systems generating petabytes of structured data. In this episode, we’ll talk about.

Capture high-value traces without managing a pipeline: Tail sampling with Adaptive Traces

Tracing is the richest observability signal in common use today. In distributed systems, it reveals how requests flow across multiple services, allowing you to uncover and address performance bottlenecks. Teams often scale back or abandon tracing altogether, however, because most successful requests produce redundant data that’s noisy and expensive to store.

Why OpenTelemetry instrumentation needs both eBPF and SDKs

As a vendor-neutral open standard, OpenTelemetry has become the default choice for application instrumentation. However, it’s important to remember that OpenTelemetry isn’t a single technology — it’s an ecosystem. Under the hood, it provides multiple options for instrumenting your applications. In this blog post, we explore two instrumentation approaches: OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation and runtime-specific OpenTelemetry SDKs, like the OpenTelemetry Java agent.

Instrumentation Hub: a guided, scalable way to roll out observability coverage without losing control

Getting started with observability in a modern, fast-moving environment is harder than it should be. Open-standards-based observability promises flexibility and vendor neutrality, but in practice it often introduces significant complexity and delays meaningful coverage by months or even years. Each layer of the stack requires its own instrumentation approach, and every technology, runtime, and library version comes with unique setup steps, tradeoffs, and rough edges.

The year in AI at Grafana Labs

2025 was the year we at Grafana Labs went all-in on AI—and boy, what a year it was. Not only did we establish and start to execute our overarching strategy (build actually useful AI), we also took one of our most exciting new features (Grafana Assistant) from idea to general availability in just nine months! Yes, there's no shortage of articles singing the praises of AI these days, but let's dispense with the hyperbole and focus on some actually useful content.

ServiceNow and Grafana: How to receive Grafana alert payloads via ServiceNow's scripted REST API

When you integrate Grafana-managed alert rules with ServiceNow, you can automatically capture and process alerts in ServiceNow’s events table—a common entry point for incident workflows, escalations, and ticket creation. And if you configure ServiceNow to receive Grafana Alerting payloads using ServiceNow’s scripted REST API, you can parse Grafana’s JSON alert payloads and insert them into a ServiceNow table.

Grafana Tempo: Upcoming 2.10/3.0 Releases (Community Call December 2025)

Upcoming 2.10/3.0 Releases New maintainer, Oleg Have questions? Please bring them! Can't comment in the chat? You may need to create a channel -- you can do this by clicking your photo in the top right corner. Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more.

How to use AI to analyze and visualize CAN data with Grafana Assistant

Note: A version of this post originally appeared on the CSS Electronics blog. Martin Falch, co-owner and head of sales and marketing at CSS Electronics, is an expert on CAN bus data. Martin works closely with end users, typically OEM engineers, across diverse industries, including automotive, maritime, and industrial. He is passionate about data visualization and AI—and he’s been working extensively with Grafana Assistant.

Grafana Labs: Top 10 moments of 2025

For Grafana Labs, 2025 was a year defined by innovation, growth, and the power of our community. We celebrated the release of Grafana 12 at our 10th annual GrafanaCON event, and marked major milestones across open source projects, including Mimir, k6, Beyla, Faro, and Alloy. It was also a year of taking bold steps forward in how teams interact with their systems and data.

Send OpenTelemetry traces and logs from Cloudflare Workers to Grafana Cloud

Cloudflare Workers is a developer platform for deploying serverless functions, frontends, containers, and databases to a global network, spanning 330+ cities around the world. However, as your application scales, it becomes crucial to have the right observability tools to investigate issues, monitor performance, and get alerts when issues arise. Last month, Cloudflare Workers announced support for exporting OpenTelemetry logs and traces, letting you send this data directly to Grafana Cloud.

Why Remote Work Just Works - Hear It From Our Grafanistas

Several Grafanistas talk about their remote work experience at Grafana Labs. Being remote-first enables our team to be based where they feel most productive and to ensure that work and life aren't in competition. And remote-first is *not* remote only. Grafanistas enjoy the opportunity to come together during team offsites or in shared co-working spaces. Connection is important.

What's new in the Grafana Image Renderer: higher-quality results, security enhancements, and more

Whether it’s for an email or that upcoming presentation, many Grafana users like to share their favorite dashboards or panels outside of Grafana itself. The Grafana Image Renderer is a backend service for Grafana that helps you do just that by rendering panels and dashboards as images, such as PNGs and PDFs, via a headless browser. It’s commonly used to support Grafana features like exporting dashboards, generating images for alert notifications, and creating PDF reports.

Contextual, in-product guidance for every Grafana user: A closer look at Interactive Learning

As developer advocates at Grafana Labs, we’re always looking for new ways to help our users better understand and learn observability. You might remember our previous project that brought learning to life through an adventure-style game, and now we’re really excited to share something else we’ve been working on: Interactive Learning, a new way to get the technical help you need directly in Grafana.

Improve service reliability and ops culture with Grafana Cloud Service Center

Today’s engineering organizations are built around service ownership. Service owners are accountable for keeping their services reliable, performant, and ready to scale. But no service operates in isolation; every team depends on others, and those dependencies form a complex web that can be hard to see, let alone understand. To truly deliver reliable systems, you need visibility not only into how your own service performs, but also how it affects others.

Grafana Service Center: Simplify Service Reliability in One Place

Grafana Service Center gives engineers and stakeholders a single place to ensure service reliability. In this video, Staff Product Manager Ryan Kehoe walks through how Service Center ties together alerts, SLOs, dashboards, incidents, and metadata for each service. Learn how to centralize reviews, speed up investigations, and improve visibility across your teams—all within Grafana Cloud.