Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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 (the first of 2025!) of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

Getting telemetry data out of modern applications is very straightforward—or at least it should be. You set up a collector that either receives data from your application or asks it to provide an up-to-date state of various counters. This happens every minute or so, and if it’s a second late or early, no one really bats an eye. But what if the application isn’t around for long? What if every second waiting for the data to be collected is billed?

Our Big Tent philosophy provides the foundation for our broad, modular, and flexible observability platform. With Grafana’s powerful ability to integrate with a wide range of data sources, tools, and plugins, you can create customized solutions tailored to your unique needs.

The Grafana Loki 3.4 release is here, and it brings a fresh wave of enhancements aimed at standardizing Loki’s object storage, helping you right size your instance, and improving the ability to ingest out-of-order logs. Loki 3.4 also represents the official merging of Promtail into Grafana Alloy as part of our efforts to give our users a single telemetry collector. There’s a lot to go over, so let’s dive in.

Observability is essential to maintaining system reliability, but as your infrastructure scales, so do your costs. Between metrics and logs, managing telemetry data can become overwhelming and expensive. Grafana Cloud is already designed to be cost-efficient, but scaling can still present cost challenges. The good news? Grafana provides robust tools and best practices to help optimize observability data and rein in spending.

In this blog, we will use the SquaredUp Cloud SCOM plugin to connect to our SCOM Management Group and take a look at what we get out of the box. SquaredUp Cloud is a data visualization tool that can connect to 70+ data sources – perfect for bringing varied data together in a single pane of glass. Display your SCOM data alongside other important metrics.

Organizations increasingly rely on Google Cloud to power critical parts of their businesses, but managing those environments often involves navigating a labyrinth of disparate data, tools, and processes. We built Google Cloud Observability in Grafana Cloud to reduce the complexity and confusion by providing a unified, scalable solution designed to simplify monitoring, enhance visibility, and optimize costs.

Before judging anyone, walk a mile in their shoes. This is a great idiom that emphasizes the importance of experiencing what your customers experience when you offer a service. With empathy, IT product owners can ensure that their operations take into account user journeys to be responsive and responsible.

In November 2023, we released Grafana Beyla 1.0, the first major milestone in our pursuit of zero-code (and zero-effort) eBPF instrumentation. We delivered a way — through a single command-line — to automatically instrument any application supporting HTTP/gRPC protocols, as well as provide basic network packet flow information.