Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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 of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates.

In our increasingly serverless world, observability isn’t just a “nice to have”—it’s essential. Serverless functions such as AWS Lambda bring incredible benefits, but they also introduce complexities, especially around monitoring and debugging. In a previous article, I provided a quick, practical guide for sending AWS Lambda traces to Grafana Cloud using OpenTelemetry.

We’re all looking for ways to improve on our incident response. We investigate various metrics and methodologies—all in the name of making sure our customers see the reliable and performant systems we’ve sought to build. In fact, all these efforts are leading us, as an industry, to finally realize the power of surprising anomalous events in our systems. They give us an opportunity to reexamine our expectations and see how our models of the sociotechnical system differs from reality.

Many engineers would agree: migrating to a new observability platform can be a serious undertaking. But it’s also the perfect opportunity to step back, revisit some of the foundational practices that drive your observability strategy — and reap some major benefits, as a result. This was the case at SpotOn, a provider of restaurant point of sales systems and business software, which recently migrated from four disparate observability tools and consolidated on Grafana Cloud.

In recent years, we’ve seen many organizations migrate from legacy incident response tools to Grafana Cloud IRM — our unified incident response and on-call management application hosted on Grafana Cloud — as they look to improve reliability, reduce costs, and consolidate their tooling. To help guide those efforts, we offer several IRM migration tools that allow you to more seamlessly migrate away from those legacy solutions and start using Grafana Cloud IRM.

Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector with native support for Prometheus, is great for all sorts of needs, including shipping your Microsoft Azure metrics and logs to Grafana Cloud.

Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability is a real user monitoring (RUM) solution that provides immediate, clear, and actionable insights into the end-user experience of web applications. Understanding where those end users are located can provide valuable insights into frontend performance, error patterns, and overall user experience.

If you want to observe your entire Kubernetes environment, you need visibility into all of your resources, including storage volumes. But monitoring Kubernetes storage hasn’t always been easy, especially if you wanted to see how it related to other parts of your infrastructure.

Cloud computing is all about efficiency. You need to get the most out of your resources without overspending or causing performance issues. For example, if you’re running virtual machines in Google Compute Engine, you need to size your instances correctly, optimize your workloads, and monitor your network traffic to prevent unexpected failures. However, when resources aren’t properly managed, things can quickly spiral out of control.

In just a few short years, OpenTelemetry has become the second largest CNCF project behind Kubernetes and is well on its way to becoming an industry standard for collecting and exporting telemetry data. And with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 just around the corner, there’s no one better to talk to about the state of OpenTelemetry than Ted Young. Ted is the co-founder of OpenTelemetry and serves on the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee.