Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

How to use custom variables in Grafana dashboards

Custom variables let you define your own options for dashboard viewers to select. They're a way to fine-tune how your dashboard behaves. In this video we'll look at how to use custom variables in your own dashboards. Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. We also have plans for every use case.

Executive Buy-In is Driving Observability Maturity: 2025 Observability Survey Results | Grafana Labs

In this video, CTO Tom Wilkie from Grafana Labs breaks down some of the most compelling findings from our third annual Observability Survey, based on over 1,200 industry responses. The big takeaway? Executive involvement is on the rise—and it’s accelerating adoption of advanced observability practices like distributed tracing, profiling, and SLOs. He also explores how SaaS adoption, the maturation of central observability teams, and new instrumentation methods like eBPF and Beyla are reshaping the observability landscape.

New Google Cloud Run Visualization in Grafana Cloud | Demo | How to Monitor Google Cloud Run

Perfect for troubleshooting, performance tuning, and cost optimization, this new feature helps you stay in control of your Cloud Run workloads. With this sophisticated dashboard, you can: Monitor CPU, memory, network traffic, and active requests at a glance Drill down into individual services and containers with a single click Identify resource usage spikes and optimize performance Use the Right-Sizing View to find the top resource-heavy services & containers.

Adaptive Metrics in Action: How The Trade Desk Optimized Observability Costs | Grafana Labs

Managing observability costs at scale is no easy task — especially when metrics volume grows fast. In this talk, Paul Givens, Head of Observability at The Trade Desk, shares how they implemented Adaptive Metrics to control costs without sacrificing visibility. How Adaptive Metrics works to reduce cardinality and cost Real-world implementation lessons from a high-scale AdTech environment Key takeaways for teams managing large Prometheus-like metric sets.

Kubernetes Monitoring: One view for observing all your storage volumes

If you want to observe your entire Kubernetes environment, you need visibility into all of your resources, including storage volumes. But monitoring Kubernetes storage hasn’t always been easy, especially if you wanted to see how it related to other parts of your infrastructure.

How to prevent performance bottlenecks in Google Compute Engine: CPU spikes, RAM waste, and network overload

Cloud computing is all about efficiency. You need to get the most out of your resources without overspending or causing performance issues. For example, if you’re running virtual machines in Google Compute Engine, you need to size your instances correctly, optimize your workloads, and monitor your network traffic to prevent unexpected failures. However, when resources aren’t properly managed, things can quickly spiral out of control.

How to use data source variables in Grafana dashboards

Data source variables let you change where Grafana looks for data without having to create duplicate dashboards. So for example, if you have multiple different Prometheus databases, you can have one dashboard and use a data source variable to choose which Prometheus that dashboard uses. We'll look at how to set these up in this video. Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. We also have plans for every use case.

Meet Ted Young, OpenTelemetry co-founder and the newest Grafanista

In just a few short years, OpenTelemetry has become the second largest CNCF project behind Kubernetes and is well on its way to becoming an industry standard for collecting and exporting telemetry data. And with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 just around the corner, there’s no one better to talk to about the state of OpenTelemetry than Ted Young. Ted is the co-founder of OpenTelemetry and serves on the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee.

License to observe: Why observability solutions need agents

Note: The original version of this blog post published on ;login: on February 24, 2025. When architecting the flow of observability data such as logs, metrics, traces or profiles, you’ve likely noticed that most solutions ask you to deploy an agent or collector. Understandably, you might be hesitant to deploy yet another application just so you can get your data into your storage system of choice.