Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Note: The original version of this blog post published on ;login: on February 24, 2025. When architecting the flow of observability data such as logs, metrics, traces or profiles, you’ve likely noticed that most solutions ask you to deploy an agent or collector. Understandably, you might be hesitant to deploy yet another application just so you can get your data into your storage system of choice.

Our engineering team is hard at work on Grafana 12, the next major release of the open source data visualization platform that we’re launching at GrafanaCON this May, but in the meantime, Grafana 11.6 is officially here — and there’s a lot to be excited about. The latest minor release delivers a number of new dashboarding features, including one-click data links and actions, along with other notable updates related to security, alerting, and more.

Across companies of all shapes and sizes, observability practices are maturing and getting attention at the highest levels. At the same time, cost and complexity continue to hinder efforts as teams look to emerging tools to help simplify their processes in hopes of better outcomes. With so much in flux, we went into our third annual Observability Survey hoping to get a window into the ways the community is approaching observability and where it wants it to go next.

In any observability stack, logs are essential for uncovering insights, troubleshooting issues, and ensuring system health. However, managing the security of logged data presents its own challenges, especially when it comes to preventing sensitive information, like API keys and credentials, from slipping into logs. Secrets can originate from a variety of sources, and it’s often challenging to predict which applications or services might inadvertently expose sensitive information.

Here at Grafana Labs, we have an on-going commitment to providing solutions that increase productivity without sacrificing ease-of-use. Last year, in line with that effort, we introduced experimental and public preview releases of Grafana k6 Studio, an open source desktop application that helps you create k6 test scripts quickly and easily via a visual interface. Today, we’re excited to share the general availability of k6 Studio v1.0.

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. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

Monitoring is an essential part of any Kubernetes deployment, helping organizations optimize cluster health, streamline troubleshooting, and control their costs. In Grafana Cloud, we offer all these capabilities (and more) in our out-of-the-box Kubernetes Monitoring solution. Since introducing Kubernetes Monitoring in 2022, we’ve been steadily adding new features, improving the UI, and making it even easier to gain insights into the state of your Kubernetes fleet.

On Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025, we experienced an outage that lasted approximately 150 minutes and impacted roughly 25% of our Grafana Cloud services. To our customers: we are very sorry and more than a little embarrassed that we stepped outside our own processes and advice to cause this. You rely on us to help monitor and troubleshoot your environments, and this type of incident obviously makes it harder for you to do that.

We announced Fleet Management in Grafana Cloud last year to solve the pain points that come with managing dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of telemetry collectors across departments and environments. And today we’re excited to announce that Fleet Management is generally available for all Grafana Cloud users who need help managing telemetry collector deployments at scale.

At Grafana Labs, we believe in treating everyone with respect, and a core aspect of respect is clear and transparent communication. When we decided to move Grafana OnCall (OSS) into maintenance mode, we knew that along with the public announcement, there would be a lot of questions.