Modern systems throw off a lot of data—metrics, traces, logs—sometimes more than we know what to do with. When you're trying to understand how values spread out over time (like response times, memory usage, or queue lengths), averages alone don’t tell the full story. OpenTelemetry histograms help fill in those gaps. This guide walks through what they are, why they matter, and how DevOps engineers can use them to improve observability in real systems.

Endre Sara is a Co-Founder of Causely, where he’s building a causal reasoning platform to continuously assure service reliability and eliminate human troubleshooting. Previously, Endre was VP of Advanced Engineering at Turbonomic and a VP at Goldman Sachs. At Causely, we believe observability tools shouldn’t just collect more data—they should enable you to understand it.

Anyone managing Microsoft Azure will be aware of how quickly its costs can escalate. As cloud architectures grow in complexity—spanning hybrid environments, multi-subscription setups, and cross-platform integrations—the need for intelligent cost visibility tools intensifies. With enterprises typically overspending by 25%-35% on their cloud resources, Azure cost reporting has become a big focus for organizations navigating cloud financial management.

Modern cloud-native applications and web browsers are highly complex, making it challenging to gain visibility into their performance. Without an effective way to track and measure frontend performance, it becomes difficult to monitor real user experiences, detect critical issues, assess website health, and ensure optimal functionality. But what if you could see exactly what your users are experiencing in real time?

We launched Adaptive Logs last year to help you optimize your log volumes and costs in Grafana Cloud, and we’ve been hard at work ever since making improvements based on your feedback. Over the past couple of months, we’ve delivered several new features to help reduce toil, apply recommendations with precision, and—what we’re most excited about—confidently optimize your log ingestion while still providing peace of mind to your end users!