Today, we are excited to announce that we are releasing new code for the OpenTelemetry Datadog receiver as open source. This code allows users to translate Datadog metric formats into native OTLP format. These metrics can then be sent to any OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics system, whether it’s Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, or another backend database.

Let’s imagine a scenario: you use OpenTelemetry, and your observability backend runs on several hosts. You collect data on application latency, and notice a recent increase that you want to investigate. But how will you know which host caused the degradation? This is exactly where OpenTelmetry resources come in. In the context of OpenTelemetry, a resource represents the entity producing the telemetry data, such as a container, host, process, service, or operating system.

While some monitoring tools excel at a specific task, observability works best when you have a holistic view of your system. You need a platform capable of working with all of your telemetry collectively, otherwise you can end up with a complex, inefficient, and expensive collection of incongruent, siloed tools. That’s what one team at Dell Technologies realized before they made a switch to Grafana Cloud last year.

In recent years, “the biggest needs we’ve heard from our customers have been to make it easier to understand their observability data, to extend observability into the application layer, and to get deeper, contextualized analytics,” said Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana Labs, at ObservabilityCON 2023.

Enhancing security and providing flexible access control has always been part of our core mission at Grafana. In line with those efforts, we made service accounts generally available in Grafana 9.1. Service accounts are essentially machines simulating Grafana users, and they are used to run automated workloads — for example, counting the number of data sources in Grafana every day or provisioning alerts using Terraform.

We are excited to announce an expansion of our partnership with Embrace to bring mobile observability to our users using open standards like OpenTelemetry. We first worked with Embrace last year when they created a plugin for Grafana that gives mobile teams an easy way to visualize and analyze real-time mobile metrics directly in a Grafana dashboard.

Many organizations use incident response setups that enable them to page on-call personnel via calling or sending a message to a phone number. In this guide, you will learn how to configure such a system by using Grafana OnCall. For practical purposes, we’ll pair it with Twilio, though the same basic workflow should be applicable to other platforms. We will start with a basic setup that uses a phone number in Twilio to both call and send SMS messages to a webhook integration in Grafana OnCall.

Each day, more than 70 million active users sign into Roblox to create, play, and interact with each other through virtual experiences. And regardless of what those experiences are, exactly — adopting a pet, completing an obstacle course, or fulfilling orders at a virtual pizza parlor — the Roblox observability team is dedicated to making them seamless.

Whether they help you tap into external data sources or add a new visualization type to your dashboard, plugins are a powerful way to customize and extend the value of Grafana. There’s a rich (and constantly evolving) ecosystem of Grafana plugins you can choose from today. While some of these plugins are created and maintained by the Grafana Labs team, many of them are contributed by our commercial partners and community members.

In 2020, we introduced the Snowflake Enterprise data source plugin for Grafana, allowing users to seamlessly pull data from the Snowflake cloud-based data storage and analytics service into Grafana dashboards. Available for Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud users, it’s a powerful way to not only query and visualize Snowlake data, but to do so alongside other data sources, so you can discover correlations and other meaningful insights within minutes.