SquaredUp vs Grafana: The Enterprise IT dashboard showdown

Modern enterprises operate across an increasingly complex mix of hybrid cloud services, and productivity platforms. As environments scale, stakeholders need a single pane of glass (SPoG) to understand what’s happening across IT operations without jumping across dozens of disconnected tools.

Generating metrics from traces with cardinality control: A closer look at HyperLogLog in Tempo

While tracing is a critical component of any observability strategy, metrics — especially RED metrics (request rate, error rate, and duration) — are widely considered the gold standard for monitoring service health. Tempo, the open source, easy-to-use, and highly scalable distributed tracing backend, is well known in the OSS community for storing and querying traces. It can also, however, generate RED metrics directly from those traces using the optional metrics-generator component.

How to create and manage secrets with Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring

Observability isn’t just about collecting metrics and logs; it’s about proactively validating that your systems work as expected. Synthetic monitoring helps teams continuously test APIs, applications, and critical user journeys. But when those checks require the use of sensitive data, securely managing credentials becomes essential to maintain both reliability and security.

Saved queries now support template variables | Grafana Cloud

In this video, Collin Fingar, Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, demonstrates how template variables can be used in saved queries, a feature that enables users to reuse queries they or others in their org have saved. You'll see how a query that contains variables can be reused, and how the variables can be replaced at the point of reuse.

Grafana Alerting: faster rules, personalized filters, and an operations workspace

Alerts are only useful when you can quickly find and act on the right signal. That's why, over the past two years, we rebuilt Grafana Alerting’s UI to make it more reliable and efficient, especially at scale. The result: a faster, paginated alert rules page that handles tens of thousands of rules, with a powerful filter dropdown and saved searches so you can quickly get back to the views you care about most.

Behind the magic of auto-instrumentation (Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Call)

You add the OpenTelemetry Java agent, restart your app - and like magic, observability appears. But is it really magic? What’s actually enabled by default? What telemetry should you expect to see? What’s missing? And what might you want to tweak, tune, or even turn off?

Block Builder: a new Mimir Component (Mimir Community Call February 2026)

At today’s community call, we will hear from David Grant, one of the engineers who has brought a new component, the Block Builder, into Mimir. Using the Ingest Storage architecture in Mimir 3.0, the Block Builder takes over the block-building responsibility from the Ingester. This feature is experimental in Mimir today, but is rolling out to production inside of Grafana Labs now. This is a great time to introduce the component, discuss the motivation, and show where it fits in the larger architecture.

Grafana Campfire - Back to Basics - (Grafana Community Call - Feb 2026)

Grafana Campfire Community Calls are back. We are starting with *Back to the Basics.* Even though you heard it so many times, but some of you are either new to or not very experienced with terms such as monitoring, observability, metrics, tracing, profiling etc. The good news is that you're not alone, and we've got this!! This will be a perfect learning opportunity to gain understanding during this live call and ask questions if anything is not clear.

The Grafana Labs operating system: Introducing our Guiding Principles

Matt Toback is the VP of Culture at Grafana Labs. We published our original company values back in December 2020. We were a young company, growing fast, and fully remote. Our values at the time were aspirational, and painted a picture of the kind of company we wanted to be. Those values did real work and they mattered. You could hear them used in everyday conversations, and they helped get us to where we are today. But growth has a way of revealing gaps.