OpenTelemetry is a popular open source project to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data, including metrics, logs, and traces. OTel, however, does not provide a monitoring backend — and this is exactly where the Grafana stack comes in. Here at Grafana Labs, we’re fully committed to the OpenTelemetry project and community.

Regardless of the industry they operate in or the number of people they employ, businesses with mature observability practices can respond to incidents faster — and save time and money in the process, according to the second annual Grafana Labs Observability Survey. Organizations are making observability a critical part of their software development lifecycles as they grapple with the complexity of modern applications.

Profile-guided optimization (PGO) is a compiler feature that uses runtime profiling data to optimize code. Now fully integrated in Go 1.21+, PGO is a powerful tool to boost application performance — and with Grafana Pyroscope, our open source continuous profiling database, you can significantly magnify the value of PGO. In this post, we’ll explore what PGO is, how the Pyroscope team has used it internally to improve performance, and how you can use PGO to make your own programs faster.

Grafana Mimir is our open source, horizontally scalable, multi-tenant time series database, which allows us to ingest beyond 1 billion active series. Mimir ingesters use consistent hashing, a distributed hashing technique for data replication. This technique guarantees a minimal number of relocation of time series between available ingesters when some ingesters are added or removed from the system.

Grafana 10.4 is here! The latest version of Grafana introduces feature updates, a new plugin, as well as provides a preview of functionality we intend to make generally available in Grafana 11, which will be featured at GrafanaCON 2024 in April. Download Grafana 10.4 Until then, the Grafana 10.4 release includes upgrades to the canvas, geomap, and table visualizations. There is also a quicker way to set up alert notifications in Grafana Alerting and a new UI for configuring SSO.

Whether your data is on the moon or in your basement, Grafana has got you covered. As the go-to platform for monitoring and observability, Grafana has been your trusty sidekick for data visualization for years, in part because we’re always looking for new ways to support our users, no matter where they keep their data. That’s why we’re excited to tell you about our latest supported data source — SurrealDB.

With its versatile palette of plugins and built-in integrations, Grafana empowers you to visualize your data, regardless of where that data is stored. Even if you need to make a direct request to a custom API, you can do that using the Infinity data source plugin, which is now officially maintained and managed by Grafana Labs. However, there’s a very specific use case that often sparks questions within the community: multi-step API calls.

Grafana Tempo 2.4 is here and comes with a stack of new features and enhancements to help improve performance and operational capabilities. Check out the video above, which highlights the new experimental TraceQL metrics feature that creates metrics from traces, and continue reading to get a quick overview of all the latest updates in Tempo. If you’re looking for something more in-depth, don’t hesitate to jump into the Grafana Tempo 2.4 release notes or the changelog.

At Grafana Labs, we’re constantly shipping new features to help our users get the most out of Grafana Cloud. In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of all the Grafana Cloud news, updates, and improvements you should know about.

I’m a senior solutions engineer here at Grafana Labs, but I recently found myself trying to solve a real-world problem in my homelab. The issue was, I have some services running there and I want to be able to access my home network when I’m away. Of course, I had to make sure my network remains safe when I do that, so I decided to deploy a simple and secure VPN.