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 Tempo 2.7 is here, and while the latest release is primarily focused on performance and operational improvements, we managed to sneak in some new TraceQL features, too!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.