Grafana Tempo 2.7 is here, and while the latest release is primarily focused on performance and operational improvements, we managed to sneak in some new TraceQL features, too!

It’s hard to believe Grafana Play has been around for almost a decade. The platform continues to be a great way to demo Grafana, play around with new features, learn what’s possible, and simply have fun with data. Grafana Play provides a publicly available version of Grafana Cloud, and requires no login for access. It’s preloaded with a wide range of sample dashboards that teach users how to work with data sources, create visualizations, and explore advanced Grafana features.

They might seem very similar at first sight, but when you zoom in on them, the differences are more apparent. Status Pages and Service Health Dashboards serve distinct purposes and cater to different audiences. As organizations adopt more complex systems, the tools used to communicate about service health and performance have become equally important. Let’s dive into the key differences, use cases, and how these tools complement each other.

As your applications scale, so too does the flood of logs, metrics, profiles, and traces—along with the costs to store and manage them. Collecting everything might feel like the safest bet, but it often leaves you buried in noise and struggling to find the signals that matter, all while costs spiral out of control.

Service-level objectives (SLOs) can be a great way to ensure you’re hitting your goals, but many software teams struggle to set realistic targets when they first set up the service-level indicators (SLIs) that underpin those efforts. Sometimes management has a decree that all services will operate with “three 9s” of availability; other times engineers pick a number out of thin air.

Instead of sifting through mountains of metrics across different network types, what if you had an AI-powered tool that could display all the necessary insights in an easy-to-understand format?

This article will give an overview of the native Graphite dashboard and how Grafana differs from it. It will first focus on Graphite's Dashboard UI and then branch out into a comparison of Grafana with the Graphite Dashboard UI, highlighting the best features of both platforms.

As the new year rolls in, it’s a great time to reflect and think big. What were some of your notable achievements in 2024, and what are your goals for 2025? We often do this in our personal lives — but why not apply this same line of thinking to observability, as well?