Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Tracing is the richest observability signal in common use today. In distributed systems, it reveals how requests flow across multiple services, allowing you to uncover and address performance bottlenecks. Teams often scale back or abandon tracing altogether, however, because most successful requests produce redundant data that’s noisy and expensive to store.

Getting started with observability in a modern, fast-moving environment is harder than it should be. Open-standards-based observability promises flexibility and vendor neutrality, but in practice it often introduces significant complexity and delays meaningful coverage by months or even years. Each layer of the stack requires its own instrumentation approach, and every technology, runtime, and library version comes with unique setup steps, tradeoffs, and rough edges.

2025 was the year we at Grafana Labs went all-in on AI—and boy, what a year it was. Not only did we establish and start to execute our overarching strategy (build actually useful AI), we also took one of our most exciting new features (Grafana Assistant) from idea to general availability in just nine months! Yes, there's no shortage of articles singing the praises of AI these days, but let's dispense with the hyperbole and focus on some actually useful content.

When you integrate Grafana-managed alert rules with ServiceNow, you can automatically capture and process alerts in ServiceNow’s events table—a common entry point for incident workflows, escalations, and ticket creation. And if you configure ServiceNow to receive Grafana Alerting payloads using ServiceNow’s scripted REST API, you can parse Grafana’s JSON alert payloads and insert them into a ServiceNow table.

Note: A version of this post originally appeared on the CSS Electronics blog. Martin Falch, co-owner and head of sales and marketing at CSS Electronics, is an expert on CAN bus data. Martin works closely with end users, typically OEM engineers, across diverse industries, including automotive, maritime, and industrial. He is passionate about data visualization and AI—and he’s been working extensively with Grafana Assistant.

For Grafana Labs, 2025 was a year defined by innovation, growth, and the power of our community. We celebrated the release of Grafana 12 at our 10th annual GrafanaCON event, and marked major milestones across open source projects, including Mimir, k6, Beyla, Faro, and Alloy. It was also a year of taking bold steps forward in how teams interact with their systems and data.

It's starting to take shape. We have a dashboard, we're collecting some metrics, and I'm getting a daily briefing every morning. Also, I have an event log where all the events are going into (the spine of the system), and there's a knowledge base which consists of a GitHub repository which is vectorized and indexed. Its first use is adding context to Herald, the agent that sends me the morning briefing. More details to come.