Grafana Play is a free and publicly accessible sandbox environment that allows users to explore and learn Grafana without setting up their own instance. Grafana Play comes preloaded with ready-made sample dashboards, and showcases how to work with different data sources, create visualizations, and use advanced Grafana features.

On March 2, 2025, Firefly Aerospace made history. The company — a space services firm that offers safe, reliable, and economical access to space — completed the first fully successful lunar landing by a commercial provider with its Blue Ghost Mission 1. But behind the headlines and highlight reels was a team of dedicated engineers, years of preparation, and a mission control center outfitted with Grafana dashboards.

Databases are a crucial part of modern systems, which means database observability is incredibly important, too. However, gathering information on them can be complex, variable, and tricky to instrument in a consistent way. OpenTelemetry is helping to change that, and one of the most important aspects in making it work is a set of shared rules called semantic conventions.

The Jira plugin is one of our most-used integrations and for good reason. Teams rely on it daily to stay on top of work, manage issues, and ship on time. As more people leaned on it, we saw a chance to make the experience even smoother. So, we gave it an upgrade. We’ve refreshed the out-of-the-box dashboards, simplified the data streams, and improved the overall experience. So, let’s take a closer look at what’s changed.

Synthetic monitoring is a vital practice to proactively track the health and performance of web applications. Instead of waiting for users to report problems, synthetic monitoring helps developers catch issues before they impact real users. One powerful type of synthetic monitoring is the browser check. These checks go beyond basic ping checks, simulating how a user would actually interact with your website’s interface.

In March, we announced that Grafana OnCall (OSS) had entered maintenance mode. However, OnCall’s development continues in Grafana Cloud as Grafana Cloud IRM, combining on-call management and incident response into one integrated solution. Many users told us they still want to self-host Grafana and rely on Grafana Alerting to detect potential issues early—but they also need to escalate and manage incidents using an incident response management (IRM) solution.