Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Generative AI is becoming a core part of modern applications, making it essential to monitor and manage how these services are used. That’s why, today, we’re excited to introduce the Anthropic integration for Grafana Cloud, a new solution that lets you connect directly to the Anthropic Usage and Cost API from within Grafana Cloud.

Andy Jiang is a JavaScript engineer with nearly 10 years of experience. He’s interested in making JavaScript and TypeScript simpler to use. He currently works at Deno as a product marketing manager. Outside of work, Andy likes cooking, writing, and playing tennis. Observability is essential for modern applications. Metrics, logs, and traces allow you to troubleshoot production issues, monitor performance, and understand usage patterns.

Did you know that observability has been around for more than six decades? It all goes back to a Hungarian-American inventor named Rudolf Kálmán who thought about how external outputs could measure the internal state of a machine. Kálmán wrote about monitoring single-input single-output systems, but our demands are very different today. We need to observe monoliths, microservices, clusters, pods, regions, and many more.

Grafana puts a powerful set of observability capabilities right at your fingertips, but onboarding entire teams to the sophisticated platform is often a nontrivial exercise—one that can slow adoption and prevent organizations from getting immediate value. We want to make the process as frictionless as possible, which is why we’re excited to tell you that Grafana Assistant is now available in public preview to all Grafana Cloud users.

Distributed tracing data is a unique and powerful observability signal, allowing you to understand how your services interact and the relationships between them. Sometimes it can be difficult, however, to turn raw tracing data into actionable insights. This is exactly why we introduced Grafana Traces Drilldown, an application that lets you quickly investigate and visualize your tracing data through a simplified, queryless experience.

Organizations in Brazil are eager to adopt some of the latest observability trends and technologies as they look to keep their software running as smoothly as possible, according to analysis of a micro survey recently conducted by Grafana Labs. Observability is an evolving space, and this is the first time Grafana Labs has run a Brazilian version of our annual Observability Survey.

A trace always remembers! Okay, okay. I will try to keep my Game of Thrones references to a minimum throughout this post, but there is a lot of truth to that statement. In observability, a trace is the “when” and “where” of telemetry signals, allowing us to track the state of interactions between services within a microservice architecture. This makes traces the ideal observability signal for discovering bottlenecks and interconnection issues.

Wilfried Roset is an engineering manager who leads an SRE team, and he is also a Grafana Champion. Wilfried currently works at OVHcloud, where he focuses on prioritizing sustainability, resilience, and industrialization to guarantee customers satisfaction. Grafana needs a database to store all its objects, such as users, dashboards, or even data sources. Each time a user creates a dashboard, it results in a new row created in the database.

We’ve all had that “uh-oh” moment. You press Enter and your blood runs cold, as you realize you just deleted something critical. For engineering teams, this type of disaster takes many forms. For example, maybe you used a DELETE statement without a WHERE clause to delete a row in a database, and accidentally deleted all of them instead. To protect you from the accidental deletion of critical resources in Grafana Cloud, we’re introducing a feature called deletion protection.

Effective alerting is the backbone of any observability strategy. But as your systems grow, managing hundreds or even thousands of rules can become a significant challenge. And when something goes wrong, the last thing you want is to fight with your tooling. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our brand new alert rules list page, which we built to provide a faster, more intuitive, and scalable experience for teams of all sizes!