At Grafana Labs we believe in shipping features early and often, and in recent years we’ve doubled down on that philosophy. We no longer wait for the yearly major release to give you access to the next big thing. Instead, we regularly make new features, bug fixes, and security patches available to our self-managing users (Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise) throughout the year.

In the last few years, many businesses have migrated much of their operations to the cloud, and with increased usage, the complexity of managing cloud costs and achieving operational efficiency has grown as well. In many cases, cloud usage is outpacing the capabilities or availability of DevOps and FinOps teams to effectively manage a larger, more complex cloud infrastructure, so cloud optimization solutions are becoming the lifeline to maintaining reliable and cost-efficient operations.

Optimization is key to achieving cost efficiency and stability for cloud environments. One optimization factor to consider is deciding which availability zones (AZ) to operate in. Location can impact cloud operations availability, performance, and cost. However, it can be a daunting task to look for the most suitable and cost-efficient AZs. There are two key challenges.

If your business is looking to prioritize efficient cross-department service delivery, you are probably in the quest for reliable and feature-rich Enterprise Service Management (ESM) software. It’s no secret that Enterprise Service Management is on everyone’s radar: this practice will make sure all service delivery is aligned with your overall company’s goals, which is no small task.

With observIQ’s contributions to OpenTelemetry, you can now use free, open-source tools to easily aggregate data across your entire infrastructure to any or multiple analysis tools. The easiest way to use the latest OpenTelemetry tools is with observIQ’s distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector. You can find it here. In this blog, we cover how to use OpenTelemetry to monitor SNMP.

In recent years, cloud financial management has evolved beyond what many cloud stakeholders anticipated. The overwhelm has led too many companies to struggle to accurately monitor, allocate, and optimize their cloud costs. This issue cost companies about 30% of their cloud budgets in 2022 alone, according to Gartner. With FinOps, you can prevent this bleeding without sacrificing innovation. Yet, taking a manual approach to FinOps can be inefficient and error-prone.

According to Amazon, EC2 Spot Instances can save you up to 90% of your spending on On-Demand Instances. It’s been proven that Reserved EC2 instances are cheaper than On-Demand ones. But, Spot Instances can offer even bigger discounts. Despite these cost benefits, Spot Instances have many caveats that make them unsuitable for some operations and processes. Even Amazon emphasizes this. Although this EC2 can save you a lot of money, some situations are best for On-Demand or Reserved Instances.