Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At SquaredUp, we’re obsessed with making monitoring not just powerful, but a genuinely delightful experience for engineers and teams. When we first built our Pingdom plugin, the goal was simple: make website uptime and performance data easy to visualize alongside everything else you care about. But as our users pushed the boundaries—connecting more endpoints, demanding richer insights, and needing faster troubleshooting—we realized our plugin needed to keep up.

Grafana Metrics Drilldown offers a queryless experience for browsing Prometheus-compatible metrics. With Metrics Drilldown — which is part of our suite of Grafana Drilldown apps — you can quickly find related metrics with just a few simple clicks, no PromQL queries required.

We’re thrilled to announce the Beta launch of Logz.io Dashboards – a major step forward in how engineers and DevOps teams visualize and analyze their telemetry data. For the first time, Logz.io users can now create dashboards that bring together logs, metrics, and traces in a single unified view — making it easier than ever to monitor performance, detect issues, and troubleshoot incidents without switching tools or losing context. This launch is more than just a product update.

When your Kubernetes app suddenly has traffic spikes in a distant country, it can be difficult to determine why. Let’s say, for example, we have an e-commerce app that started to receive an unusual surge of visitors from Australia — something we never anticipated. We search for answers in our logs, but without geographic context, we don’t have the full insights we need.

Autonomous analytics are changing everything. Don’t we all love dashboards? Those pixel playgrounds of donut charts, bar graphs, and KPI-based visuals. Well, guess what? They may not survive what comes next. Teams once hovered over them like ancient monks reading entrails, guessing what churn rates might predict or which sales region would wake up next quarter. That practice will no longer serve its purpose.

Grafana Alerting has evolved dramatically since the legacy dashboard-alert days. Today, Grafana-managed alerts power enterprise-scale monitoring in Grafana Cloud and on-prem installations. And over the last two years, we’ve added RBAC, state history, versioning, and much more. At the same time, our own monitoring at Grafana Labs relies heavily on Prometheus-style alerts—a situation that’s not uncommon for our users, too.

In my role as Senior Observability Architect here at Grafana Labs, one of the things I focus on is making sure customers are getting the most out of our products. Recently, I noticed a trend where customers were struggling to get SAML authentication configured properly. They were getting stuck on some of the steps needed to configure the users key pair values, which allows users to log in with the correct roles assigned in Grafana.