Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Telemetry Talks ep 4: Retroactive sampling and OpenTelemetry

This episode of Telemetry Talks explores the evolution of an OTLP/gRPC tracing pipeline for VictoriaTraces within OpenTelemetry and VictoriaMetrics, including a shift from standard gRPC-Go to a simplified HTTP/2-based implementation to reduce complexity and improve flexibility. Together with the our guest, Jiekun, we revisited the VictoriaMetrics KubeCon talk ideas on tail-based and retroactive sampling — and their impact on the broader OpenTelemetry community.

VictoriaMetrics Virtual Meetup Q1 2026 - VictoriaMetrics Cloud Updates

VictoriaMetrics Cloud continues to mature as a secure, reliable, and cost-efficient observability platform. With PrivateLink now available across all regions, including Frankfurt, users can operate entirely without exposure to the public internet. Blue-green cluster deployments enable seamless, zero-downtime updates, while incremental backups ensure storage efficiency by capturing only what has changed. Operational visibility is improved with clearer alert states, showing Firing and Resolved conditions upfront. Security enhancements include stronger password policies and expanded authentication safeguards.

Not All Telemetry Requires Premium Pricing

Observability in software is often framed as a choice between self-hosted and SaaS: manage it yourself, or pay a vendor to handle your data. Both self-hosted and SaaS approaches have their merits, but assuming you must choose one exclusively over the other leads to poor trade-offs: either overcommitting to an all-in-one SaaS despite spiraling costs, or fully self-hosting when it’s unnecessary.

VictoriaMetrics at KubeCon Amsterdam: Community Highlights

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam brought together about 13,500 attendees this year, the largest turnout yet. The size of the event showed just how much the cloud-native space has grown, and how central observability, platform engineering, and cost control have become. For VictoriaMetrics, this year’s event was a mix of talks, booth conversations, and a lot of direct feedback from users.

VictoriaMetrics Virtual Meetup Q1 2026 - VictoriaMetrics Updates

VictoriaMetrics continues to enhance usability and developer experience with new built-in capabilities. A lightweight UI now provides clear client setup instructions, simplifying onboarding, while an integrated inspector offers powerful debugging tools directly within the platform. Default tenant configuration further streamlines initial setup, reducing friction for new deployments. In addition, the MCP Server is now included by default in VictoriaMetrics Cloud deployments, eliminating the need for manual installation and making advanced monitoring workflows more accessible out of the box.

What's New in VictoriaMetrics Cloud Q1 2026? Logs, MCP Server, Better Alerting, and... a Secret Project

Q1 2026 has been one of our most eventful quarters yet for VictoriaMetrics Cloud. We shipped something we have been building towards for a long time, crossed a few infrastructure milestones, and started clearing the path for what is coming next to the most performant observability stack.

VictoriaMetrics at KubeCon: Optimizing Tail Sampling in OpenTelemetry with Retroactive Sampling

Last month, the VictoriaMetrics team gave a talk on retroactive sampling at KubeCon Europe 2026. By writing this blog post, as a transcript of the session, we want to explain how retroactive sampling reduces outbound traffic, CPU, and memory usage in the data collection pipeline significantly compared to tail sampling in OpenTelemetry.

VictoriaMetrics March 2026 Ecosystem Updates

Welcome to the March release roundup of VictoriaMetrics Stack, covering key enhancements in VictoriaMetrics and VictoriaLogs. These updates deliver improved UI scalability, enhanced authentication flexibility, improved query performance, and logging tools that streamline observability workflows in production environments. This roundup covers releases for.