Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Over the years, we’ve seen our community embrace Grafana k6 browser as a key component of their frontend testing strategies. By helping collect frontend web vitals, capture custom metrics, and simulate user actions like clicking buttons or completing forms, the module offers teams a deeper understanding of performance and availability from their end users’ point of view.

For the longest time, observability was centered around logs, metrics, and traces, but the growth of more complex systems has made continuous profiling another essential part of maintaining healthy systems. It provides insights into resource usage and latency down to the code level, delivering key insights to improve performance.

I recently joined the Developer Advocacy team here at Grafana Labs, and have been exploring ways to accelerate my Grafana learning journey. Like many others in the Grafana community, my introduction to the open source project happened when I needed a way to easily visualize data that resided in external databases, mostly using SQL queries.

As organizations navigate increasingly complex tech environments, unified observability practices have become essential. That was one of the main takeaways from Grafana Labs Co-founder Anthony Woods’ recent appearance on “Tech Keys by by Mercari India,” a podcast hosted by Vaibhav Khurana, Head of Platform Engineering at Mercari India.

Grafana 12.2 has arrived, delivering new features to help you and your team move from data to decisions faster than ever. Grafana 12.2: Download now! Below are just some of the highlights from the latest Grafana release.

Have you ever been in a situation where know your team is going to run their weekly maintenance window and you silence your notifications to prevent a flood of false positives from pinging your inbox? If you are associated with a team that uses any type of alert system, you know how easily alert fatigue can happen. The incessant and unpredictable (or even, at times, predictable) pings, emails, and notification alerts can drive even the most serene worker totally batty.

When DNS or domain name server resolution processes fail, or become sluggish, users can experience timeouts, connection errors, and degraded performance — often without clear indication of the root cause. This is where DNS checks in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring come in, allowing you proactively monitor domain name resolution, verify that domains resolve to the correct IP address, and even measure how quickly that resolution occurs.

Grafana Cloud’s flexibility is one of its greatest strengths, but the breadth of choices can sometimes be overwhelming. We see this a lot when it comes to selecting the right architectural approach, with organizations unsure of how many stacks they need to host their environment. Grafana Cloud provides robust features for managing tenancy, enabling organizations to effectively handle diverse teams and projects.

Until recently, Grafana Mimir — our open source, horizontally scalable, multi-tenant time series database (TSDB) — has exclusively used Prometheus’ PromQL engine to evaluate queries. While the PromQL engine works great, it sometimes needs a lot of memory to run, specifically in the Mimir querier component. To address this memory consumption issue, we recently introduced Mimir Query Engine (MQE).

Performance testing is critical to build reliable applications, but testing at scale, especially inside modern Kubernetes environments, can be a challenge. For example, how do you coordinate tests across multiple nodes, test private services without compromising security, or even do both at once? And most importantly, how do you do all this without adding too much operational complexity to your stack?