Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

2025 was the year we at Grafana Labs went all-in on AI—and boy, what a year it was. Not only did we establish and start to execute our overarching strategy (build actually useful AI), we also took one of our most exciting new features (Grafana Assistant) from idea to general availability in just nine months! Yes, there's no shortage of articles singing the praises of AI these days, but let's dispense with the hyperbole and focus on some actually useful content.

Getting started with observability in a modern, fast-moving environment is harder than it should be. Open-standards-based observability promises flexibility and vendor neutrality, but in practice it often introduces significant complexity and delays meaningful coverage by months or even years. Each layer of the stack requires its own instrumentation approach, and every technology, runtime, and library version comes with unique setup steps, tradeoffs, and rough edges.

If you search for “OpenTelemetry Agent”, you will likely encounter two completely different definitions. This ambiguity often leads to confusion between infrastructure teams and application developers. SREs and DevOps engineers would describe it as a component deployed as a sidecar, whereas application developers would understand it as a language-specific library. Let’s break it down in the next section.

Modern.NET applications rely on three primary Web API architectures: lightweight REST APIs, middleware-driven ASP.NET Core Web APIs, and contract-heavy WCF SOAP services. Each exposes functionality over HTTP, but each behaves very differently in production. More importantly, each architecture fails in different ways, which means teams must monitor them differently to maintain reliability, uptime, and predictable performance.

Looking for a reliable SolarWinds alternative? If you’ve been comparing SolarWinds and WhatsUp Gold, you’re not alone. Many IT teams are evaluating which network monitoring solution offers better performance, flexibility and cost efficiency. In this guide, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step migration from SolarWinds to WhatsUp Gold, highlighting key differences, benefits and best practices to maintain a smooth transition.

Grafana’s MySQL datasource makes it easy to turn raw database rows into clean, interactive dashboards. Whether you're testing out a new monitoring setup or experimenting with time-series data, MySQL + Grafana gives you a powerful foundation for building visualizations quickly.

ScienceLogic recently partnered with Gisual—a leader in AI power intelligence­—to bring real-time power insight directly into the ScienceLogic AI Platform. On the surface, that might sound like a straightforward integration story. In reality, it signals something much bigger: observability continues to expand well beyond the digital stack, and operators now treat power as a first-class operational signal.

In the mobile-first digital economy, your application’s performance is your brand’s frontline. Your backend is fast. Your APIs respond in milliseconds. Yet, somewhere on a slow network in a bustling city center, a user is staring at a frozen login screen. This scenario highlights a critical truth. App synthetic monitoring is the proactive discipline of simulating real user interactions—like app launches, logins, searches, and checkouts—from real devices and networks worldwide.

Imagine this: It’s three in the morning on Black Friday. Your phone appears with alerts, your online store’s checkout isn’t functioning properly. Your team is in a panic, sales are dropping by the minute, and social media is full of complaints from your clients. Determining that the problem is an expired third-party payment gateway means you’ve lost hours of sales and your customers’ trust.