Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Open source has always been the bedrock for everything we build here at Grafana Labs, going all the way back to Grafana creator Torkel Ödegaard’s first commit in December 2013. Ten years after Grafana Labs was founded, open source continued to be our driving force as we worked to develop and evolve our core OSS tools and technologies in 2024.

Throughout 2024, we made a ton of updates to Grafana Cloud, our fully managed, cloud-hosted observability platform powered by the Grafana LGTM (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics) Stack. And, looking back, most of those updates were made with the same three goals in mind: to make Grafana Cloud more efficient, more intelligent, and easier to use, including for those just starting out on their observability journey.

Holidays came early for AWS users: Grafana 11.4 introduces support for two new query languages in the AWS CloudWatch data source plugin. Grafana 11.4: Download now Announced during AWS re:Invent, AWS CloudWatch Logs expanded its querying capabilities with the addition of OpenSearch Piped Processing Language (PPL) and OpenSearch SQL. In Grafana 11.4, the AWS Cloudwatch data source plugin has been updated to offer the same functionality — and the same flexibility.

Grafana Alerting has seen steady growth and adoption since it was revamped in Grafana 9. Since then, we’ve been busy making your alerts more robust, more reliable, and easier to manage. As part of that process, Grafana Alerting has adopted several concepts from Prometheus. The Prometheus alerting model is well understood and flexible, and with Grafana Alerting we want to bring that same flexibility to all Grafana data sources.

With 2024 coming to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on how Grafana Cloud has evolved this year — and synthetic monitoring, in particular, is one area where we’ve really focused our efforts. In May, we rolled out a revamped version of Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring with the overall goal of making your monitoring processes not just more efficient, but more impactful.