Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When an application request slows down, a trace can show a database call. Finding the database query behind it can be tedious, requiring you to switch between traces and database telemetry, as well as match timestamps or query text by hand. In Grafana Cloud, the Database Observability app already provides a window into all of your database telemetry, including query samples, performance history, and explain plan.

Many Grafana Cloud customers love what Alloy offers them, but we're also seeing a growing base of users who feel the same way about the OpenTelemetry Collector. We want to make it easy for customers to make the decision that makes the most sense, regardless of their preference.

It's no secret that getting started with observability can be much harder than it should be. That's why, at ObservabilityCon 2025, we introduced Instrumentation Hub: a guided, scalable way to roll out observability coverage while still keeping you in control. Today, we’re excited to announce that Instrumentation Hub is now Generally Available in Grafana Cloud.

Grafana 13.3 is here, bringing more consistency and control to how you work across Grafana. Cross-dashboard variables help you manage shared dashboard controls from one place, while Notebooks let you capture and share findings from across Grafana in a single, editable document. You'll also get a first look at Grafana's biggest visual refresh since Grafana 7, along with new ways to guide and refine dashboards built with Grafana Assistant.

When evaluating AI models for observability, generating a plausible query or explanation isn't enough. Teams need to know whether an agent's conclusions are supported by telemetry, whether its changes to dashboards actually work, and whether it can deliver reliable results consistently. This is why we built o11y-bench, Grafana Labs' open benchmark for evaluating AI models on observability and SRE tasks. And today, we're excited to share two updates.

Agents have quickly become part of the tech landscape as organizations embrace AI across their businesses. But embracing agents also means embracing the monitoring best practices that have long been part of engineers' workflows: tracking performance, catching errors, and responding to incidents But it doesn't stop there. Agents also introduce new challenges.

You're investigating checkout errors when someone asks who's coordinating the incident. Support needs an update, and another responder is looking for the runbook. You stop what you're doing to get everyone pointed in the same direction. They're all reasonable requests, but each one takes your attention away from understanding the problem. Yes, your team has a process for handling incidents, but carrying it out is another job for someone who's already busy.

You've just finished a deployment, and though your service is up, you start to notice some requests are getting slower. To address the lag, someone—or, more likely, some group of people on your team—needs to watch the dashboards, decide whether the change matters, investigate what happened, and turn the findings into a fix. At each step you're gathering context—and often explaining that context again to the next person or tool.

Today at ObservabilityCON 2026 in San Francisco, we unveiled a range of new Grafana Cloud capabilities designed to reshape cloud economics, bring richer context and deeper visibility across your systems and end-user experiences, and help teams move toward autonomous operations. Check out the keynote to learn more about the latest updates to the open agentic observability cloud, and read on for a quick recap of all the news from ObservabilityCON 2026.