Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When you add a domain to a DNS monitor, the first question is simple: which records should it watch? Until now there were two answers, and both had a catch. Autodiscovery probes hundreds of common names — www, mail, _dmarc, the usual suspects — and it catches most of what real zones contain. But if you named a record something unusual, no wordlist in the world is going to guess it.

Every on-call engineer has lost an evening to some version of this. Something breaks; the fix is usually somewhere in the logs, and the logs are scattered everywhere: a dozen servers, a few containers, a couple of cloud services, none of them in one place. So, you SSH into one box, grep, get nothing, move to the next, and an hour later there are fifteen terminal tabs open and still no clear sequence of events. Log aggregation tools kill that scramble.

The new Advanced Pipeline Editor went live for all paid plans, we launched a public Blueprints library of ready-made pipeline patterns, we reworked plan pricing and raised the Free tier to 100 GB/day, and the source and processor catalog grew with an AWS Neuron source, an AWS CloudWatch metrics source, and a full set of XML processors. None of these are flashy on their own.

We’ve overhauled macOS monitoring in the latest Netdata release. Netdata already collects system metrics on Macs at per-second resolution; this release completes the picture with logs and hardware telemetry, areas that previously required users to run CLI tools like log show and powermetrics. The new collectors read this data through Apple’s own frameworks, allowing users to trace application and OS errors and catch hardware issues early.

Software systems are getting better at understanding themselves. The mix of richer telemetry, smarter pipelines, and agentic AI is shifting observability from a passive record of events into something more active and useful. That shift is what we mean by context engineering. We recently partnered with O’Reilly on a report by David Beale that introduces the discipline. Before you read it, here are five things worth knowing.

We’re delighted to share that Grafana Labs has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms for the third consecutive year. Notably, we’re also positioned furthest in “Completeness of Vision” for the second year in a row.