Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We’re excited to announce version 2.2.0 of the backend for our Kubernetes Monitoring solution in Grafana Cloud is now available. The app’s backend is supported by kubernetes-mixin, an open source Prometheus Monitoring Mixin, and this latest version features significant improvements to alert rules and recording rules that will enhance your cluster observability and monitoring experience. There’s a lot to tell you about, so let’s dive in.

One of the biggest challenges in frontend development is understanding how users actually experience your application. Slow load times, layout shifts, and a slow response to user interactions can quietly degrade the user experience if they go unnoticed. This is where Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability comes in. Frontend Observability is a hosted service for real user monitoring (RUM) that provides immediate, clear, and actionable insights into the end user experience of web applications.

When Microsoft engineers went looking for a modern visualization platform to help track critical signals and make quicker decisions, Grafana emerged as the clear favorite. But there was just one hitch: the available authentication methods didn’t quite meet their needs.

We’re thrilled to share that Grafana Labs has been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms—for the second year in a row. This year’s report placed Grafana Labs furthest in “Completeness of Vision,” which we believe reflects our deep commitment to building a truly open, composable observability stack that gives users flexibility, control, and the tools to own their observability strategy.

Microsoft Teams is a ubiquitous presence in workplaces all over the world. Prior to 2020, its usage was relatively moderate, with around 20 million users. However, global restrictions during the pandemic led to a 3,500% growth. Teams is now so central to business operations that Microsoft retired Skype in its favor. But this massive scale created a new problem – businesses needed better ways to monitor and report on their Teams usage.

ElasticSearch is one of the IT and software industry’s most established platforms for storing and analyzing log data. As its name suggests it also has a powerful search and analytics engine based on the ElasticSearch Query language. ElasticSearch itself is essentially a backend store, so if you want to explore and analyze your data, you will need a visualization layer such as SquaredUp and our ElasticSearch PlugIn.