Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Last week, hundreds of engineering leaders, SREs, platform teams, and developers joined us for Summer Scoop 2025, our biggest launch event yet. The way that we think about our product development at Cortex revolves around all the different types of users who are in our product every day.

Everything looks fine—dashboards are green, logs are quiet. But users start reporting slow response times. No errors, no traffic spikes. Just a general slowdown. It’s a common situation. Not all problems show up as crashes or clear failures. Sometimes, performance degrades quietly, and standard metrics don’t catch it early. But that's where Prometheus alerting can help, if you're monitoring the right signals.

When requests slow down across your microservices, tracing helps you understand where time is spent. Jaeger and Zipkin are two popular tools for distributed tracing, built to answer a simple question: where did the request go? If you're choosing between them or just exploring options, this guide breaks down the differences and when each one might be a better fit.

What digitalization of public services looks like, and how to achieve it.

The healthcare sector, perhaps more than any other, needs to scrutinize the balance between data utility and data privacy. Healthcare organizations must manage large amounts of sensitive data while complying with stringent regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). For IT teams seeking to implement AI-augmented service management, that responsibility weighs heavily.

With AI at the center of media and industry focus, cybersecurity teams are increasingly putting pressure on themselves to prepare for AI-fueled cyber attacks. According to Ivanti’s 2025 State of Cybersecurity research, half of IT security professionals ranked “yet unknown weaknesses” as a high or critical threat – the same as or higher than compromised credentials, supply chain risks, DDoS attacks and other real-world threats.

As OnlineOrNot has grown, I've been building features quickly to get them into your hands as fast as possible. However, this meant I ended up with multiple versions of similar pages that looked and worked differently from each other. This month, I focused on putting systems in place to create a consistent experience across all parts of the dashboard, making everything look and feel unified.

Today’s IT environments are rarely confined to a single data center or a single cloud provider. Enterprises are embracing a mix of cloud platforms, virtual machines, and on-premises hardware to stay agile and competitive. This blended environment is known as hybrid IT infrastructure, and managing it effectively is key to keeping systems healthy, secure, and performing at their best.

Have you heard that Search Packs are now officially generally available?

At Grafana Labs, we’ve always believed that observability should be open and accessible — that belief extends beyond metrics, logs, and traces to the costs associated with managing observability at scale. That’s why we’re excited to share that we’ve adopted the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification ( FOCUS), a community-driven, open standard for cloud billing data.