As Grafana evolved over the years, so did our panel headers. In our quest for improvement, we continually added design options that created more comprehensive panels, but also an increasingly complex interface. It was a process of continual adaptation without a roadmap — which, though well-intentioned, began to result in unforeseen challenges.

At Grafana Labs, we want to empower our fellow Grafanistas and the community to get the most out of the Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). As part of this effort, we recently launched a new Grafana developer portal. And now, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the Saga Design System, which establishes a shared visual language for all of Grafana Labs’ offerings.

Starting around June this year, we upgraded our Grafana databases in Grafana Cloud from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8, due to MySQL 5.7 reaching end-of-life in October. This project involved tens of thousands of customer databases across dozens of MySQL database servers, multiple cloud providers, and many Kubernetes clusters.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 is just around the corner, and the OSS and cloud native community is eagerly anticipating the event, which will take place November 6 - 9 in Chicago.

In the ever-changing field of artificial intelligence, OpenAI is consistently seen as a leader in innovation. Its AI models, starting with GPT-3 and now with GPT-4, are already used extensively in software development and content creation, and they’re expected to usher in entire sets of new systems in the future.

Grafana Tempo 2.3 has been unleashed upon the world, bringing with it the latest iteration of the vParquet backend! Tempo 2.3 has a little bit of everything, but the headline item here is vParquet3 and new features that improve search speeds. Watch the video above for all the details, or continue reading to get a quick overview of the latest updates in Tempo. If you’re looking for something more in-depth, don’t hesitate to jump into the changelog or our Grafana Tempo 2.3 release notes.