Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You've optimized your Largest Contentful Paint. Your Time to First Byte is under 200ms. Your Lighthouse scores are green. And yet, your checkout conversion rate is quietly dropping. A segment of users in Southeast Asia is churning. Your support team is fielding tickets about a form that "just doesn't work" and you have no idea which one. Traditional frontend performance monitoring tells you whether your application is fast. It doesn't tell you whether people are actually succeeding when using it.

We’re delighted to share that Grafana Labs has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms for the third consecutive year. Notably, we’re also positioned furthest in “Completeness of Vision” for the second year in a row.

When you're the on-call engineer and something breaks, you can quickly find yourself deep in a series of tools you don't regularly use—switching tabs, copying query results, and manually stitching together a picture of what's happening and why. People are increasingly turning to AI to get around this, but the results can be a mixed bag.

Modern applications can fail in many different ways, from performance regressions and frontend errors to systems that break under heavy load. Because no single testing or monitoring approach can catch every type of failure, effective reliability testing requires multiple layers that validate your application before, during, and after their release.

In January, we announced that Grafana Labs had assumed maintenance of the business intelligence (BI) plugins created by Volkov Labs, and committed to a six-month maintenance period. Today, we’re sharing an update: we're extending our maintenance commitment through the end of 2026. As announced earlier this year, that commitment includes maintaining compatibility with recent Grafana releases while handling bug fixes, security updates, and community contributions on a best-effort basis.

One of the primary reasons organizations adopt Grafana Cloud is to create a single pane of glass across the data they collect from self-hosted systems, cloud providers, and third-party platforms. Bringing those signals together enables richer correlations, reduces tool sprawl, and makes it easier for teams to understand what's happening across their environment. But as observability grows and becomes more centralized, access management becomes more important.

Many times, the hardest part of troubleshooting isn’t fixing the actual problem. It’s figuring out where to start. As engineers, it’s easy to lose count of how many times we’ve opened logs, then 10 metrics tabs, and another 10 tabs with trace queries, only to end up back in the logs trying to find a root cause.

Earlier this year, Grafana 13 laid the groundwork for making it easier and faster than ever to turn your data into actionable insights. With our latest minor release, Grafana 13.1, we're building on that foundation, expanding observability as code, bringing Grafana Assistant to more data sources, and streamlining the everyday workflows teams rely on to visualize, analyze, and act on their data. Download Grafana 13.1 Below are just some of the highlights from Grafana 13.1.

You can use Grafana Assistant Investigations to automatically discover incidents and help find root causes—and this AI-powered Grafana Cloud feature recently got a major upgrade to give you even more confidence in its findings. You can read more about the behind-the-scenes effort in our new engineering blog Unprompted, where we get into harness engineering, context compaction, benchmarking, and keeping agents alive and working well in long-running sessions.

For many development teams, a load test starts with a set of assumptions. You pick 100 virtual users because it sounds reasonable. You ramp for 30 seconds because that's what the tutorial showed. You set a 500ms threshold because it feels like a good target. The test passes, you ship the release, and production falls over at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday because your synthetic load never resembled how real users interact with your application.