When we introduced the Explore apps suite for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles last year at ObservabilityCON 2024, our goal was simple: offer a queryless, point-and-click experience so you can quickly find insights in your observability data—no queries or complicated syntax required. Our commitment to that goal remains unchanged, but we’re excited to announce that the Explore apps have a new name: Grafana Drilldown.

In the last few years, Postgres has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity. A relational database that not long ago was relatively unknown outside of academic circles has now eclipsed MySql as the most popular database for developers in the most recent StackOverflow user survey. Why has it achieved such impressive popularity with developers?

If you are involved in software development you will probably be aware of the ever-growing menace of supply chain attacks. These are attempts by attackers to insert malicious code into code libraries which might be downloaded or referenced by developers. Many modern frameworks can install hundreds or even thousands of dependencies, so the potential attack surface can be huge. As well as code libraries, attackers can also attempt to conceal malware in sources such as Docker images or CDNs.

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). In case you missed them, here’s our monthly round-up (the first of 2025!) of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

Getting telemetry data out of modern applications is very straightforward—or at least it should be. You set up a collector that either receives data from your application or asks it to provide an up-to-date state of various counters. This happens every minute or so, and if it’s a second late or early, no one really bats an eye. But what if the application isn’t around for long? What if every second waiting for the data to be collected is billed?

Our Big Tent philosophy provides the foundation for our broad, modular, and flexible observability platform. With Grafana’s powerful ability to integrate with a wide range of data sources, tools, and plugins, you can create customized solutions tailored to your unique needs.

The Grafana Loki 3.4 release is here, and it brings a fresh wave of enhancements aimed at standardizing Loki’s object storage, helping you right size your instance, and improving the ability to ingest out-of-order logs. Loki 3.4 also represents the official merging of Promtail into Grafana Alloy as part of our efforts to give our users a single telemetry collector. There’s a lot to go over, so let’s dive in.

Observability is essential to maintaining system reliability, but as your infrastructure scales, so do your costs. Between metrics and logs, managing telemetry data can become overwhelming and expensive. Grafana Cloud is already designed to be cost-efficient, but scaling can still present cost challenges. The good news? Grafana provides robust tools and best practices to help optimize observability data and rein in spending.