Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Tail sampling vs. head sampling in distributed tracing

Dec 18, 2025 By Grafana In Grafana
In this video, Grafana Labs' Robin Gustafsson (CEO for K6 + VP, Product) and Sean Porter (Distinguished Engineer) discuss the differences between head sampling and tail sampling approaches in distributed tracing. They explore why head sampling often amounts to sampling randomly and hoping for the best, while tail sampling — the approach used by Adaptive Traces in Grafana Cloud — allows you to intelligently capture the traces that actually matter to you.
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Logging Best Practices (Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Call)

Dec 18, 2025 By Grafana In Grafana
We’re back with a new Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Call episode, and this time we’re diving into logging with OpenTelemetry and Grafana Loki! Even better, we’re joined by two fantastic guests: Jack Berg, OTel logging expert, and Ed Welch, Loki guru. Getting both of them in one conversation makes for an amazing deep-dive into all things logging. Logs come in every shape and size, from simple CLI output to massive distributed systems generating petabytes of structured data. In this episode, we’ll talk about.
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Capture high-value traces without managing a pipeline: Tail sampling with Adaptive Traces

Dec 18, 2025 By Chris Marchbanks In Grafana
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.
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Why OpenTelemetry instrumentation needs both eBPF and SDKs

Dec 18, 2025 By Fabian Stäber In Grafana
As a vendor-neutral open standard, OpenTelemetry has become the default choice for application instrumentation. However, it’s important to remember that OpenTelemetry isn’t a single technology — it’s an ecosystem. Under the hood, it provides multiple options for instrumenting your applications. In this blog post, we explore two instrumentation approaches: OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation and runtime-specific OpenTelemetry SDKs, like the OpenTelemetry Java agent.
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Instrumentation Hub: a guided, scalable way to roll out observability coverage without losing control

Dec 17, 2025 By Paschalis Tsilias In Grafana
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.
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The year in AI at Grafana Labs

Dec 17, 2025 By Trevor Jones In Grafana
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.
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ServiceNow and Grafana: How to receive Grafana alert payloads via ServiceNow's scripted REST API

Dec 16, 2025 By George Reyes In Grafana
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.
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