At Grafana Labs, we are fully committed to the open source OpenTelemetry project and are actively engaged with the OTel community. Many Grafanistas spend a large proportion of their time contributing directly to OpenTelemetry upstream projects, helping make observability more powerful, reliable, and accessible for everyone as part of our big tent philosophy.

Today marks a big milestone in our mission to bring more data, more context, and more visibility into a single, unified view. We’re excited to announce 16 brand‑new integrations, extending the range of data sources you can connect with just a few clicks. But the integrations themselves are only half the story.

Sometimes the biggest challenges in software aren’t about code — they’re about consensus. What do we call things? What do we standardize? And how do you evolve a system that thousands of companies depend on without breaking everything along the way?

If you’re looking for a dashboarding solution today, chances are you’ve looked at Grafana or SquaredUp — or both. Grafana is a popular open source dashboarding tool with on-prem and cloud variants, while SquaredUp is the SaaS, cloud-based unified dashboarding solution. Both offer a comprehensive list of data sources that they can plug into and build dashboards. As such, they both also offer an integration with Azure - which is the focus of our discussion today.

Dashboards are supposed to answer questions, not create more of them. But investigations don't stop at a single view. The moment you want to understand one specific thing in detail like a failing VM, a degraded service, a slow pipeline, dashboards start to break down. You end up either building yet another dashboard or searching through many different ones. SquaredUp's Perspectives changes this.