Continuous profiling offers deep visibility into production environments, revealing exactly how applications consume CPU and memory. It’s the go-to observability practice for directly connecting system behavior and performance to specific lines of code. But when teams consider deploying continuous profiling more broadly, a common question comes up: what’s the overhead? Is it safe to run continuous profiling on my production services 24/7, or does the cost outweigh the benefits?

Note: This blog post originally published in May 2025 and was updated in February 2026 to reflect that Git Sync is now available in public preview in Grafana Cloud. As your Grafana instance scales, so does the challenge of maintaining dashboards. Managing dozens—or hundreds—of dashboards through the UI alone can quickly become overwhelming. Tracking changes gets murky, dashboards multiply, and consistency suffers.

Grafana Assistant is the most general-purpose tool we’ve delivered since dashboards. People use our Grafana Cloud LLM to understand unfamiliar areas of their stacks, generate dashboards and beautiful visualizations out of thin air, build queries, and support investigations.

Creating a custom dashboard is the best way to monitor metrics that matter most to your systems. Tools like MetricFire make this process straightforward by combining hosted Grafana and Graphite, eliminating the need for self-hosted solutions. Here's how you can build dashboards tailored to your needs.

As agentic AI applications are used more broadly in production, they introduce new operational models, combining multi-step reasoning, tool execution, and autonomous decision-making into a single workflow. SRE teams need visibility into how these agents behave, where they fail, and how they perform over time.

Let’s be real: AI can hallucinate. And in observability, that feels risky. No one wants an assistant that sends your SREs chasing ghosts. At best, that burns expensive engineering time. At worst, it slows incident response in production and pushes teams toward the wrong remediation path. So here’s the big question: What makes Grafana Assistant different, and why should you trust it? Let’s start by acknowledging the fear. AI hallucinations are a real issue.

Back in 2021, Grafana Labs CTO Tom Wilkie (then VP of Products) spoke at PromCON about the need for improvements in Prometheus' remote write capabilities. “We use between 10 and 2 bytes per sample to send via remote write, and Prometheus only uses 1 or 2 bytes per sample on the local disk so there’s big, big room for improvement,” Wilkie said at the time.

Sometimes the most interesting engineering stories don’t start with a roadmap or a release plan—they start with personal taste. A preference for good design. A frustration with clunky tools. A desire to see everything in one place.