Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Labels are a powerful way to organize telemetry and define policies across Grafana Cloud, helping to streamline alerting, attribution, access control, and more. But traditionally, custom labels in Synthetic Monitoring have worked a little differently: they only lived on a single sm_check_info metric, and Grafana Cloud prefixed each one with label_.

If your Cypress suite has tests that fail more often or run slower, you know it can be hard to figure out the pattern from a single job. It could be one spec that slowed down, or a single test that fails, or maybe the entire suite is trending slower. The root cause could be a bug in the app, or a flaky test, or something else.

Modern engineering teams instrument everything, with metrics, logs, traces, and profiles flowing from hundreds of services at once. But full-stack observability isn’t really about collecting more telemetry; it's about having a single, unified picture of how your services connect to every layer beneath them, including their dependencies, the pods and nodes they run on, and the logs, traces, and profiles that explain their behavior.

Starting an experiment with an LLM has never been easier. Keeping a growing collection of those experiments consistent is another matter. Earlier this year, as more teams began exploring AI features here at Grafana Labs, we repeatedly encountered the same pattern: a new experiment would start, move quickly, and build its own client for whichever model provider it needed. The next experiment would do the same, with a slightly different abstraction for streaming, tools, errors, or provider configuration.

Running Alloy as a single-instance sidecar is simple. Running it as a centralized gateway that absorbs the full telemetry stream of an enterprise platform—tens of millions of active series, terabytes of logs per day, and tens of thousands of trace spans per second—is a different challenge altogether. To get it right, you need deliberate capacity planning, honest load testing, and a monitoring setup that doesn't rely on the very thing you're testing.

Grafana 13.2 is here, bringing more improvements to help you and your team explore your data and get to insights faster. Download Grafana 13.2 In this post, we’ll highlight the latest updates to saved queries, a feature that lets teams share, discover, and reuse queries to get to trusted answers faster and help new teammates get up to speed. We’ll also explore how the new View panel sidebar makes exploring busy panels a breeze.

On the product team here at Grafana Labs, we consider AI agents our users, too. That’s why we set out to test how well agents can debug incidents across the full stack, and how much better they perform with Grafana Cloud’s Knowledge Graph vs. using raw telemetry alone. Our early results are promising. In one real incident we replayed 16 times each way, an agent with Knowledge Graph context found the correct root cause 15 times, compared with just once using raw telemetry alone.

Say you get a support escalation about a page in the app that won’t load. But when you pull up your synthetic checks, they're all green: 100% uptime, probes are passing. Something's not adding up, but which one do you trust? If you’ve run Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring, you’ve been on both sides of this. Sometimes it's the ticket: real users hit a wall on the path but your checks pass cleanly. Other times, it’s the inverse.

Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability helps engineering teams quantify the end user experience by bringing metrics, logs, traces, and user session context to client-side web applications. Teams can monitor application health and performance over time, triage errors, and correlate frontend signals with backend telemetry to investigate issues across the stack.

As testing workflows become more AI-assisted, fast access to accurate documentation matters more than ever. Whether you're writing a new load test, troubleshooting an issue, or having an AI agent generate a script for you, you need reliable guidance that keeps pace with the way you work. But most documentation still lives in a browser. Every time you or your agent needs to verify an API or look up a best practice, you're forced to leave your terminal or editor and interrupt your workflow.