I've used the Web API plugin with a wide range of APIs, and each one taught me something new. But before diving into building, I learned to pause and ask: What am I actually trying to display? Not what data the API can give me, but what would be useful on a dashboard? That shift in thinking — from ‘fetch everything’ to ‘fetch what matters’ — shapes how I approach every integration.

As we gear up for Grafana 13, the next major release of the open source data visualization platform that we’ll announce at GrafanaCON this April, our engineering team is still shipping some powerful new features along the way. Case in point: Grafana 12.4 is officially here, and there’s a lot to be excited about. The latest minor release includes a ton of updates that help you build and design dashboards faster than ever, as well as manage and scale those dashboards seamlessly over time.

If you've ever rolled out Grafana Cloud to a growing engineering organization, this pattern may sound familiar: Everything feels simple at first. You invite a few teammates, give them access, and dashboards start appearing. Then the team grows. Then the number of stacks grows. Over time, a model that once felt fast and empowering starts to feel risky, difficult to understand, and even harder to undo. This post is about avoiding that moment.

At Grafana Labs, we are fully committed to the open source OpenTelemetry project and are actively engaged with the OTel community. Many Grafanistas spend a large proportion of their time contributing directly to OpenTelemetry upstream projects, helping make observability more powerful, reliable, and accessible for everyone as part of our big tent philosophy.

Today marks a big milestone in our mission to bring more data, more context, and more visibility into a single, unified view. We’re excited to announce 16 brand‑new integrations, extending the range of data sources you can connect with just a few clicks. But the integrations themselves are only half the story.