Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2025

How to integrate performance testing and continuous profiling for deeper application insights

A key goal of performance testing is to ensure your applications perform well under various levels of load. While critical, these tests are often conducted with minimal insight into why a system performs a certain way during testing. Metrics, logs, and traces may tell part of the story, but can miss the deeper details. This is where continuous profiling comes in.

Grafana 11.5 release: easily share Grafana dashboards and panels, secure frontend code for plugins, and more

New year, new Grafana release! Grafana 11.5 is here with new features to enhance how you can share, migrate, and alert on all your data in Grafana. Grafana 11.5: Download now Below are just some of the highlights from the latest Grafana release. If you are looking for more details about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog or the What’s New documentation.

Grafana 11.5 Now GA! Here's the TL;DR | Grafana Labs

Grafana 11.5 is here, packed with exciting updates to enhance your workflow! This release focuses on three main areas: Sharing visualizations with streamlined workflows for exporting dashboards and panels, enhanced PDF reporting options, and the ability to share links with sample images. Managing data with upgraded ad-hoc filters and powerful transformations for extracting and organizing messy data. Migrating to the cloud with the new Grafana Cloud migration tool that supports all plugins and Grafana alerting (now in public preview).

Grafana 11.5: Faster and Easier Migration to Grafana Cloud | Support for Plugins and Alerts

Updates to the Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant: Plugins and Alerts! Thinking about moving to Grafana Cloud? Whether you're an OSS user exploring cloud benefits or an enterprise customer transitioning a large deployment, the Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant makes it simpler and faster than ever.

Redesigned Dashboarding Sharing Experience in Grafana 11.5 | Grafana Labs

In Grafana version 11.5, we've completely redesigned the dashboard sharing experience to make it more intuitive, user-friendly, and efficient! This update is available in all editions of Grafana. Join Natacha (Product Designer) and Juani (Senior Software Engineer) from the Grafana Labs Sharing Squad as they walk you through these updates and demonstrate how to streamline your sharing workflow in Grafana 11.5.

Grafana 11.5 New Filters UI for Grafana Dashboards (Public Preview) | Grafana Labs

Introducing the new Filters UI in Grafana, now available in public preview! This update makes interacting with ad-hoc filters faster, more intuitive, and keyboard-friendly, giving you a streamlined experience when managing filters in your dashboards. What’s New? Unified filter input – Manage all filters in a single combo-box-like UI Faster interactions – Requires fewer clicks and takes up less space Keyboard-friendly navigation – Easily create, edit, and delete filters with shortcuts Multi-value support – Select multiple values with the new one-of/not-one-of operators.

How to migrate to Grafana IRM: find the right path for your organization

Hundreds of organizations have migrated from legacy incident response tools to Grafana IRM in recent years as they look to improve production reliability, reduce costs, and consolidate their tooling. Grafana IRM, our incident response and management product, has helped organizations such as LATAM Airlines simplify stressful incidents with observability-native workflows, but every organization has its reservations about the actual migration process.

Grafana Campfire - 2024 Wrap-up and What's coming in 2025 (Grafana Community Call - January 2025)

Happy New Year Everyone. We are kicking off Grafana Campfire Grafana Community Calls for 2025. David Kaltschmidt, Carl Bergquist, Mat Ryer, and Syed Usman Ahmad will talk about the year 2024 as what we have accomplished in such a short time and what is exciting to come in the year 2025. Today, Mich Seaman who is the Product Director will be joining us and will share some insights as well.

Databases and SLOs: How to apply service level objectives to your databases with synthetic monitoring

Wilfried Roset is an engineering manager who leads an SRE team and he is a Grafana Champion. Wilfried focuses on prioritizing sustainability, resilience, and industrialization to guarantee customers satisfaction. Nowadays databases are commonly used to build information systems. Relational or NoSQL, self-managed or as-a-service, those databases often play a critical role in the overall health of your applications.

How to run Loki at scale on Kubernetes (Loki Community Call January 2025)

Happy New Year from the Loki Engineering team. To kick off 2025, Nicole and Jay will be joined by Poyzan Taneli from the Loki Engineering team to discuss how to run Loki at scale on Kubernetes. If you are currently running Loki in microservices mode or preparing to do so, we will be discussing best practices for scaling its components to meet the demands of production use cases.

Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart 2.0: a simpler, more predictable experience

The Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart 2.0 is here, and it comes with some exciting changes to improve your experience collecting observability data. The Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart makes it easy to start gathering telemetry data from your Kubernetes clusters. With one deployment, you can capture all of the metrics, logs, traces, and profiles from your cluster and the applications running on it!

Grafana Cloud updates: tools to streamline performance testing, a new Adaptive Logs feature, and more

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). In case you missed them, here’s our monthly round-up (the first of 2025!) of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

Demystifying the OpenTelemetry Operator: Observing Kubernetes applications without writing code

The promise of observing your application without writing code (i.e., auto-instrumentation) is not new, and it’s extremely compelling: run a single command in your cluster and suddenly application telemetry starts arriving at your observability backend. What else could you ask for? The OpenTelemetry Operator aims to fulfill such a dream for Kubernetes environments by using a set of well known patterns such as operators and custom resources.

Grafana Play updates: recent growth, new privacy policies, and more

It’s hard to believe Grafana Play has been around for almost a decade. The platform continues to be a great way to demo Grafana, play around with new features, learn what’s possible, and simply have fun with data. Grafana Play provides a publicly available version of Grafana Cloud, and requires no login for access. It’s preloaded with a wide range of sample dashboards that teach users how to work with data sources, create visualizations, and explore advanced Grafana features.

What is Adaptive Telemetry, and how can it reduce MTTR, noise, and cost?

As your applications scale, so too does the flood of logs, metrics, profiles, and traces—along with the costs to store and manage them. Collecting everything might feel like the safest bet, but it often leaves you buried in noise and struggling to find the signals that matter, all while costs spiral out of control.

Grafana SLO: Easily predict the likelihood that you'll hit your target

Service-level objectives (SLOs) can be a great way to ensure you’re hitting your goals, but many software teams struggle to set realistic targets when they first set up the service-level indicators (SLIs) that underpin those efforts. Sometimes management has a decree that all services will operate with “three 9s” of availability; other times engineers pick a number out of thin air.

Optimize Observability and Cut Costs Without Losing Insights | What is Adaptive Telemetry? | Grafana

Managing telemetry can quickly spiral out of control, leading to ballooning costs and overwhelming data volumes. But what if you could save time, reduce costs, and maintain the critical insights your team relies on? In this video, learn how Adaptive Telemetry helps you: Sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account today and unlock the potential of distributed tracing in your performance testing workflow.

OpenTelemetry and Grafana Labs: what's new and what's next in 2025

As the new year rolls in, it’s a great time to reflect and think big. What were some of your notable achievements in 2024, and what are your goals for 2025? We often do this in our personal lives — but why not apply this same line of thinking to observability, as well?

How to send OTLP or Prometheus metrics and logs to Grafana Cloud with Grafana Alloy

We introduced Grafana Alloy last year in an effort to create the best possible open source “big tent” telemetry collector. A continuation of our work on Grafana Agent Flow, we designed Alloy to simplify observability at scale and to easily integrate with the OpenTelemetry and Prometheus ecosystems. We’ve seen lots of interest since Alloy was announced at GrafanaCON 2024, and industry observers are taking notice, too.

How CERN uses Grafana and Mimir to monitor the world's largest computer grid

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is famous for operating the world’s largest particle accelerator, but did you know that CERN is also at the heart of the world’s largest computing grid? And with such unprecedented computing demands comes some serious observability needs.