The OpenTelemetry project provides many different components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, new users often find it hard to pick the right ones and configure them properly for their specific use cases. For this reason, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, which is a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components. Here at Grafana Labs, we are all-in on OpenTelemetry.

When we began offering Grafana Cloud Metrics, we set a service level agreement (SLA) for 99.5% of requests to be completed within a few seconds. So we built an alert that would go off if more than 0.5% of requests were slower than a couple of seconds within a five-minute moving window. Sounds reasonable, right?

During the opening keynote of ObservabilityCON 2023 in London, we announced a range of new updates to make it easier and faster for the open source observability community to get started and scale their observability stacks.

As more organizations adopt observability at massive scale, they have also been grappling with rising costs. Over the past 12 months, we have been working on different solutions to help our users better understand and manage their observability stack, not to mention the bills that come with scaling it.

The Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics) offers the freedom and flexibility for monitoring application performance. But we’ve also heard from many of our users and customers that you need a solution that makes it easier and faster to get started with application monitoring.

At Grafana Labs we meet our users where they are. We run our services in every major cloud provider, so they can have what they need, where they need it. But of course, different providers offer different services — and different challenges. When we first landed on AWS in 2022 and began using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), we went with Cluster Autoscaler (CA) as our autoscaling tool of choice.

As Grafana evolved over the years, so did our panel headers. In our quest for improvement, we continually added design options that created more comprehensive panels, but also an increasingly complex interface. It was a process of continual adaptation without a roadmap — which, though well-intentioned, began to result in unforeseen challenges.

At Grafana Labs, we want to empower our fellow Grafanistas and the community to get the most out of the Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). As part of this effort, we recently launched a new Grafana developer portal. And now, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the Saga Design System, which establishes a shared visual language for all of Grafana Labs’ offerings.