Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Monitoring your systems isn't enough anymore. Neither is “asking questions about your system”. Operational Intelligence embraces observability to proactively deliver business insights, support decision-making, and accelerate innovation. It seems that as the observability market grows and more and more products come into the space, the meaning of the term observability itself becomes more and more nebulous.

Choosing the wrong metric type in Prometheus can lead to inaccurate dashboards, false positives in alerting, and missed indicators of system failure. Gauge metrics are intended for tracking values that can go up and down, such as memory usage, queue depth, or the number of active connections. Unlike counters, which only increment (or reset on restart), gauges reflect the current state of a resource at scrape time.

Two years ago, a power outage knocked a Dropbox data center offline. It wasn’t just any data center. It was the only one where Dropbox hosted Grafana Loki, meaning engineers couldn’t access their log data. “We had considered a data center outage when we were rolling out Loki, but it had just never risen up in priority enough to get put into multiple data centers,” said Chris Hodges, an infrastructure software engineer at the cloud storage company.

As we previously reported on April 26, 2025, we had a security incident via an insecure GitHub Action and we have since published a post-incident review. We have confirmed that there has been no code modification, unauthorized access to production systems, exposure of customer data, or access to personal information.

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack ( Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). In case you missed them, here’s our monthly round-up of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates.

After four years. Hundreds of meetings and conversations. Countless forms and paperwork submissions… …We’ve done it. SquaredUp is finally, officially B Corp certified We can now say that we are part of a unique global movement – and we couldn’t be more proud, excited, and motivated for our journey ahead.

Imagine setting up your AWS configuration in Grafana Cloud by hand and clicking through menus. When you only have a few services, it’s not a big deal. But as you add more and more, keeping track of every little change becomes a headache. It’s easy to make mistakes, and before you know it, things can get out of sync and your monitoring becomes unreliable.