Whether they’re for synthetic monitoring, large-language models, or some other use case, Grafana application plugins are a fantastic way to enhance your overall Grafana experience. Data for these custom experiences can come from a variety of sources, including nested data sources. However, they can also come from third-party APIs, which usually require authentication to access.

Grafana Labs is happy to announce that we have partnered with Intigriti, a leading bug bounty platform, to expand our bug bounty program. This collaboration will enable us to work more effectively with security researchers from around the world in a scalable, sustainable way. Moving to a platform that handles initial triage will allow us to focus on valid reports and expand our scope, covering a wider range of Grafana Labs developed products and services.

Gerard van Engelen is a seasoned DevOps engineer who ensures the quality of products by drawing parallels between complex issues and simpler, everyday scenarios. This approach helps in delivering value, ensuring that products are not only built correctly but also offer the right functionalities. Ansible is popular with system administrators and DevOps professionals who use it for automating IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration.

One of the great powers of Grafana is the open source community behind it — a community that provides a breadth of ready-to-use dashboards, plugins, exporters, and instructions that make a million tasks easier. The sheer scale of it all means whatever you need probably already exists somewhere. To illustrate this, I want to share an example of how to use these tools as a base for building a comprehensive database monitoring solution.

Every time the platform engineering team at San Francisco-based startup Mux deploys new software, there are two must-have components: proper access controls and observability. But until recently, their observability stack left the team frustrated, reactive, and largely in maintenance mode.

We are excited to share a significant update for Grafana Pyroscope users and the broader open source community: the launch of Explore Profiles, a new application that makes it easier and faster to surface meaningful insights from your profiling data. Explore Profiles is a Grafana app plugin designed to integrate seamlessly with Grafana Pyroscope, the open source continuous profiling backend, providing a smooth, queryless experience to browse and analyze your profiling data.

In the fast-paced world of technology, change is constant — and nowhere is that more evident today than in the flood of new features and advancements involving large language models (LLMs). They power various applications, from chat bots to advanced copilots. And as these LLMs and applications become more sophisticated, it will be vital that they work well and reliably. This is where observability, with the help of OpenTelemetry (using OpenLIT), plays an essential role.

Whether it’s 3 in the morning and you’re trying to resolve an outage, or you’re testing a new feature and you need to resolve a recurring issue so you can move on to your next task: time is of the essence. Wouldn’t it be great if your observability tooling could direct you to your “aha” moment, without you needing to fumble with writing a query?

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of the latest and greatest updates for Grafana Cloud this month. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

By running performance tests continuously and automatically, you can identify and correct performance regressions as they occur. One way to do this is by integrating performance testing into your development process. In this step-by-step post, we explore how to do just that, using Grafana k6 and GitHub Actions. k6 is an open source load testing tool to test the performance of APIs, microservices, and websites.