It’s almost 1 p.m. on a Monday afternoon and you’re hungry. You pull up your meal delivery app and select your favorite restaurant and dish. Then you go to check out and nothing happens. Your frustration mounts as you get hungrier by the minute. But there’s frustration on the other side of that transaction as well—engineers are scrambling to figure out what’s wrong as orders drop and revenue losses rise.

Choosing the wrong metric type in Prometheus can lead to inaccurate dashboards, false positives in alerting, and missed indicators of system failure. Gauge metrics are intended for tracking values that can go up and down, such as memory usage, queue depth, or the number of active connections. Unlike counters, which only increment (or reset on restart), gauges reflect the current state of a resource at scrape time.

As we look at the role AI can play in Grafana going forward, we want to move beyond the simple chat responses that dominate the world of LLMs today and into agentic systems—AI that can understand, reason, and act on your behalf. The ultimate goal is to make it easy to get things done in Grafana using natural language—whether you’re a seasoned SRE or a new developer. And in the AI world, we call this moving from chat completion to task completion.

Monitoring your systems isn't enough anymore. Neither is “asking questions about your system”. Operational Intelligence embraces observability to proactively deliver business insights, support decision-making, and accelerate innovation. It seems that as the observability market grows and more and more products come into the space, the meaning of the term observability itself becomes more and more nebulous.

Two years ago, a power outage knocked a Dropbox data center offline. It wasn’t just any data center. It was the only one where Dropbox hosted Grafana Loki, meaning engineers couldn’t access their log data. “We had considered a data center outage when we were rolling out Loki, but it had just never risen up in priority enough to get put into multiple data centers,” said Chris Hodges, an infrastructure software engineer at the cloud storage company.

As we previously reported on April 26, 2025, we had a security incident via an insecure GitHub Action and we have since published a post-incident review. We have confirmed that there has been no code modification, unauthorized access to production systems, exposure of customer data, or access to personal information.

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack ( Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). In case you missed them, here’s our monthly round-up of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates.