Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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.

At Grafana Labs, we’ve always believed that observability should be open and accessible — that belief extends beyond metrics, logs, and traces to the costs associated with managing observability at scale. That’s why we’re excited to share that we’ve adopted the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification ( FOCUS), a community-driven, open standard for cloud billing data.

Grafana Metrics Drilldown offers a queryless experience for browsing Prometheus-compatible metrics. With Metrics Drilldown — which is part of our suite of Grafana Drilldown apps — you can quickly find related metrics with just a few simple clicks, no PromQL queries required.

When your Kubernetes app suddenly has traffic spikes in a distant country, it can be difficult to determine why. Let’s say, for example, we have an e-commerce app that started to receive an unusual surge of visitors from Australia — something we never anticipated. We search for answers in our logs, but without geographic context, we don’t have the full insights we need.

Grafana Alerting has evolved dramatically since the legacy dashboard-alert days. Today, Grafana-managed alerts power enterprise-scale monitoring in Grafana Cloud and on-prem installations. And over the last two years, we’ve added RBAC, state history, versioning, and much more. At the same time, our own monitoring at Grafana Labs relies heavily on Prometheus-style alerts—a situation that’s not uncommon for our users, too.

In my role as Senior Observability Architect here at Grafana Labs, one of the things I focus on is making sure customers are getting the most out of our products. Recently, I noticed a trend where customers were struggling to get SAML authentication configured properly. They were getting stuck on some of the steps needed to configure the users key pair values, which allows users to log in with the correct roles assigned in Grafana.

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. With GrafanaCON 2025 — and the release of Grafana 12 — earlier this month, there are a ton of Grafana Cloud updates to share.