I recently joined the Developer Advocacy team here at Grafana Labs, and have been exploring ways to accelerate my Grafana learning journey. Like many others in the Grafana community, my introduction to the open source project happened when I needed a way to easily visualize data that resided in external databases, mostly using SQL queries.

As organizations navigate increasingly complex tech environments, unified observability practices have become essential. That was one of the main takeaways from Grafana Labs Co-founder Anthony Woods’ recent appearance on “Tech Keys by by Mercari India,” a podcast hosted by Vaibhav Khurana, Head of Platform Engineering at Mercari India.

Grafana 12.2 has arrived, delivering new features to help you and your team move from data to decisions faster than ever. Grafana 12.2: Download now! Below are just some of the highlights from the latest Grafana release.

Have you ever been in a situation where know your team is going to run their weekly maintenance window and you silence your notifications to prevent a flood of false positives from pinging your inbox? If you are associated with a team that uses any type of alert system, you know how easily alert fatigue can happen. The incessant and unpredictable (or even, at times, predictable) pings, emails, and notification alerts can drive even the most serene worker totally batty.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) live and die by their data. Externally, clients expect clear reporting, fast responses, and visible proof of value. Internally, smooth operations and low overheads are essential to business success. But with so many tools, key data is scattered across multiple systems – PSA, RMM, cloud services, ticketing, monitoring, finance – and that causes blind spots. Dashboards fix this problem by consolidating data into a single view.

When DNS or domain name server resolution processes fail, or become sluggish, users can experience timeouts, connection errors, and degraded performance — often without clear indication of the root cause. This is where DNS checks in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring come in, allowing you proactively monitor domain name resolution, verify that domains resolve to the correct IP address, and even measure how quickly that resolution occurs.