Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In our increasingly serverless world, observability isn’t just a “nice to have”—it’s essential. Serverless functions such as AWS Lambda bring incredible benefits, but they also introduce complexities, especially around monitoring and debugging. In a previous article, I provided a quick, practical guide for sending AWS Lambda traces to Grafana Cloud using OpenTelemetry.

We’re all looking for ways to improve on our incident response. We investigate various metrics and methodologies—all in the name of making sure our customers see the reliable and performant systems we’ve sought to build. In fact, all these efforts are leading us, as an industry, to finally realize the power of surprising anomalous events in our systems. They give us an opportunity to reexamine our expectations and see how our models of the sociotechnical system differs from reality.

Many engineers would agree: migrating to a new observability platform can be a serious undertaking. But it’s also the perfect opportunity to step back, revisit some of the foundational practices that drive your observability strategy — and reap some major benefits, as a result. This was the case at SpotOn, a provider of restaurant point of sales systems and business software, which recently migrated from four disparate observability tools and consolidated on Grafana Cloud.

In recent years, we’ve seen many organizations migrate from legacy incident response tools to Grafana Cloud IRM — our unified incident response and on-call management application hosted on Grafana Cloud — as they look to improve reliability, reduce costs, and consolidate their tooling. To help guide those efforts, we offer several IRM migration tools that allow you to more seamlessly migrate away from those legacy solutions and start using Grafana Cloud IRM.

Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector with native support for Prometheus, is great for all sorts of needs, including shipping your Microsoft Azure metrics and logs to Grafana Cloud.

Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability is a real user monitoring (RUM) solution that provides immediate, clear, and actionable insights into the end-user experience of web applications. Understanding where those end users are located can provide valuable insights into frontend performance, error patterns, and overall user experience.