Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It has become common knowledge that the nature of software development has changed as AI-code generation and agent-based features gain adoption. In perhaps a more subtle shift, the fundamentals of software instrumentation are changing too. As OpenTelemetry becomes the standard instrumentation layer across enterprises, with thousands of developers (many from Honeycomb) actively contributing to it, the nature of the telemetry data captured itself is evolving to meet the growing demand for rich context.

You’re reading an old performance article, and it keeps talking about “First Meaningful Paint.” You search for how to improve it, but every tool gives you different advice. Some don’t mention it at all. What’s going on? Here’s the short answer: First Meaningful Paint is dead. Google deprecated it in Lighthouse 6.0 back in 2020 and removed it completely in Lighthouse 13. If you’re still trying to optimize for FMP, you’re chasing a ghost.

AI code generation is fast. Making it reliable requires runtime context. Today, Kiro gains live runtime visibility with the Lightrun MCP. This grounds AI-assisted development in how code actually behaves at runtime. Kiro, the AI coding assistant from the teams at AWS, is built for velocity and intuition. It moves from specification to production with speed and structure, helping teams turn intent into working code. But until now, like every AI coding assistant, Kiro had a major blind spot.

It’s your site’s huge, annual sale weekend, and your online store’s checkout process went down for 10 minutes. At your conversion rate, that’s $10,000 in lost sales. Thankfully, it came back up after only 10 minutes, but the real issue is that you only found out from customer complaints on social media. You spent months on email marketing and other campaigns driving traffic to this sale, and now those efforts are turning into customer frustration instead of revenue.

In 2026, we are seeing incredible feats of engineering with agentic AI, impacting metrics and distributed traces that map thousands of microservices. Our systems have never been more intelligent and complex. However, as our observability becomes more intelligent, fewer employees know how to manage and troubleshoot complex systems. These employees, who often bear the brunt of an error’s impact, may need to rely on specialists to interpret the system.

Creating a custom dashboard is the best way to monitor metrics that matter most to your systems. Tools like MetricFire make this process straightforward by combining hosted Grafana and Graphite, eliminating the need for self-hosted solutions. Here's how you can build dashboards tailored to your needs.

Setting up alert thresholds in Graphite transforms raw monitoring data into actionable notifications, helping you address system issues before they escalate. Here's what you need to know.

Grafana Assistant is the most general-purpose tool we’ve delivered since dashboards. People use our Grafana Cloud LLM to understand unfamiliar areas of their stacks, generate dashboards and beautiful visualizations out of thin air, build queries, and support investigations.

Note: This blog post originally published in May 2025 and was updated in February 2026 to reflect that Git Sync is now available in public preview in Grafana Cloud. As your Grafana instance scales, so does the challenge of maintaining dashboards. Managing dozens—or hundreds—of dashboards through the UI alone can quickly become overwhelming. Tracking changes gets murky, dashboards multiply, and consistency suffers.

Organizations are starting to question whether the value they get from traditional Network Monitoring Systems (NMS) justifies the budget they’ve locked into them.