A common pattern when building Grafana dashboards is to represent data for many items at once, such as simultaneously monitoring hundreds of servers. But what if there’s a problem with one of those servers? You’d want the ability to quickly identify that single server, and drill into the details without noise from all the other systems. In Grafana, dashboard variables are a great way to filter data and focus on the information that’s most important to you.

Grafana has grown to become one of the most prominent dashboarding tools available, with an extensive set of features that support organizations of all sizes. There can come a time, however, when you have too many dashboards. As a software engineer, you might think, “Why can’t I do with dashboards what I do with my code?” That is, you know how to keep your code in version control (e.g., Git). You know how to share and review your code with colleagues (e.g., pull requests).

In 2020, we introduced the GitHub data source plugin for Grafana, helping organizations visualize and gain deeper insights into their use of the popular version control and collaboration platform. Since then, thousands of users have installed the data source, and we’ve been working hard to extend its capabilities and make it even easier to use.

Modern websites typically have a backend API and a frontend user interface. Testing both is essential to deliver a reliable user experience and optimize engagement. Historically, Grafana Cloud k6 has helped you check one of these boxes, allowing you to test your website’s backend APIs with protocol tests. Now, we are excited to share that you can also validate your website’s frontend performance with the new browser testing feature in Grafana Cloud k6.

Roll out the red carpet! Grafana 11.3 is here and marks the general availability of Scenes-powered dashboards, which set the foundation for what we envision the future of Grafana dashboards will be. But the current state of Grafana dashboards looks pretty awesome as well. The dashboard experience has improved, including the ability to trigger API calls from any canvas element with the new Actions option across many visualizations.

When it comes to observability, different people have different levels of expertise. Some can readily rip out 50-line PromQL queries, complete with masterful usage of functions like group_left and label_replace.

Generative AI has emerged as a powerful force for synthesizing new content—text, images, even music—with astounding proficiency. However, monitoring, optimizing, and maintaining the health of these complex AI systems is challenging, and traditional observability tools are struggling to keep pace. At Grafana Labs, we believe that every data point tells a story, and every story needs a capable narrator.

Monitoring application health is a lot like monitoring your personal health. Vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure, and overall well-being can spot problems before they escalate, helping us maintain good health. Similarly, application health requires constant monitoring of performance indicators like CPU usage, memory consumption, and application response times.

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 it, here’s a roundup of the latest and greatest updates for Grafana Cloud this month. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

As part of our big tent philosophy here at Grafana Labs, we believe you should be able to access and derive meaningful insights from your data, regardless of where that data lives. One of the ways we stay true to that philosophy is through our Enterprise data sources.