Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Context switching isn’t just inefficient—under pressure, it’s exhausting. It slows decision-making, increases the risk of mistakes, and makes even experienced engineers feel like they’re always a step behind the system they’re responsible for. At Grafana Labs, we want to build tools that meet you where you are. That's why we embedded Grafana Assistant, our context-aware AI assistant, directly in Grafana Cloud.

Earlier this year we launched Grafana Cloud Fleet Management to address the pain that comes with managing scores of telemetry collectors across departments and environments. We've been excited to see how organizations are using it to manage collectors at scale, but we've also heard from users who aren't sure how Fleet Management fits with their existing infrastructure-as-code tooling. The good news is Fleet Management is designed specifically to complement—not replace—tools like Terraform.

For many teams, 2024 was the year of asking, “can OpenTelemetry do this?” In 2025, the community answered with a resounding “yes,” moving beyond experimentation to focus on what matters most in practice: stability, ease of use, and cross-project compatibility. That momentum now sets the stage for what’s to come for OpenTelemetry in 2026.

In engineering, there's a concept known as the Iron Triangle. With three sides—cost, quality, time—it's a framework intended to help you prioritize different aspects of project management Want fast, high-quality features? It'll cost you. Need to keep costs down while maintaining quality? That'll take time. And if you're trying to move fast and cheap? Well, good luck with quality. For years, this has been the brutal reality of running services on the web.

When you're on a software team, planning for the weeks and months to come is always a challenge. You have to balance deep feature backlogs, business and leadership requests, customer requests, and operational interruptions. Effective planning requires a way to prioritize the backlog, set realistic roadmap goals, and justify decisions.

Even with a powerful database or visualization layer, performance can suffer if queries aren’t optimized or system settings aren’t tuned. The new Mimir Query Engine in Grafana Cloud improves query efficiency, but there are still best practices you can follow to keep dashboards fast and responsive—whether your data source is hosted in Grafana Cloud or running on-premises.

Note: this post was co-authored by Nicholas Borg, 3CX Product Manager. 3CX provides a robust, flexible IP PBX platform used by organizations of all sizes to power their contact centers. It offers detailed call activity, agent performance metrics, and operational insights — all of which become even more powerful when visualized.