Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Shopify is a fantastic tool for organizations who want to sell products, but don’t want to build or maintain an e-commerce platform themselves. Even some of the largest brands that have built their own e-commerce platforms in the past have seen the value of using Shopify to accelerate their business. As your Shopify site scales and grows, however, you may need more insight into the performance of your store.

Andrew Dedesko is a backend software engineer with 13 years of experience. He became very interested in metrics and alerting after being woken up countless nights while on call. Outside of work, Andrew likes cycling, camping, making s’mores, and pancakes. Adriano Mariani is a software engineer with three years of experience specializing in backend software development. Currently, Adriano is working at Kijiji on SEO-related initiatives.

Synthetic monitoring is a critical practice to proactively track the health and performance of web applications. By simulating user interactions, this approach helps developers identify issues before they impact real users. One of the simplest forms of synthetic monitoring is known as a ping check, which verifies whether an endpoint is reachable. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at what a ping check is, and then walk through how to perform one using Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring.

Organizations around the world use Microsoft Azure to power their businesses. The cloud computing platform includes hundreds of products and services organizations can use to build and manage applications, but monitoring those environments can often feel like navigating a maze of fragmented data, tools, and processes.

Grafana’s extensibility has always been one of the keys to its success. It comes with a wide range of data sources that allow you to query your data no matter where it lives, visualizations to help you quickly make sense of that data, and apps that can provide complete observability solutions, all in a single package.

Logs play a critical role in observability, but they do come with their own challenges. Grafana Loki, our horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system, addresses these challenges head on, giving you an open source tool that’s both cost effective and easy to operate.

This year Grafana Mimir — the open source, horizontally scalable, multi-tenant time series database (TSDB) — will celebrate its third anniversary. Over the years, Mimir has become the go-to, Prometheus-compatible metrics backend within the open source community, with 29 maintainers and more than 4.6k GitHub stars. Since introducing Mimir, we’ve worked hard to deliver on our promise of making it the most scalable and performant open source TSDB in the world.

When we introduced the Explore apps suite for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles last year at ObservabilityCON 2024, our goal was simple: offer a queryless, point-and-click experience so you can quickly find insights in your observability data—no queries or complicated syntax required. Our commitment to that goal remains unchanged, but we’re excited to announce that the Explore apps have a new name: Grafana Drilldown.

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 them, here’s our monthly round-up (the first of 2025!) of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

Getting telemetry data out of modern applications is very straightforward—or at least it should be. You set up a collector that either receives data from your application or asks it to provide an up-to-date state of various counters. This happens every minute or so, and if it’s a second late or early, no one really bats an eye. But what if the application isn’t around for long? What if every second waiting for the data to be collected is billed?