While we built Grafana Loki as an open source log aggregation system that is cost effective and easy to operate, let’s face it: sometimes there is no time or bandwidth to mess around with self-managing and self-hosting. Luckily there’s the fully managed Grafana Cloud observability stack for log management. “Grafana Cloud is a no-BS platform. The engineering costs of hosting it ourselves would be much higher," says Jameel Al-Aziz, a software architect at Paradigm.

Grafana Cloud constantly evolves to include new, cutting-edge features for end-to-end observability. In fact, just last month at ObservabilityCON 2023, we made a number of updates to our fully managed observability platform, including the general availability of Grafana Cloud Application Observability, Grafana SLO, and Adaptive Metrics.

Grafana Agent v0.38 has hit the digital shelves just before the holiday season! 🧑‍🎄 The elves over at Grafana Labs have been quietly working on Grafana Agent, with more than 50 updates for all SREs and developers to use — no matter if you’re on the naughty or nice list. This includes new features, improvements, bug fixes, and significant ease-of-use changes.

Learning about the past helps us understand the present, and even predict the future. So, whether you are monitoring CPU usage or how long your IoT device was powered on and then off, at some point, you might want to know the difference of a value over time. InfluxDB is an open source database for storing and retrieving time series data. Thanks to its own query languages — flux and InfluxQL — it provides different and powerful ways to analyze data.

Since we introduced role-based access control (RBAC) in Grafana 9.0, users — and later, service accounts — have been required to have an assigned role that includes a basic set of permissions. This sometimes led organizations to create users and service accounts that had more permissions than necessary. As a result, Grafana administrators had to make additional adjustments to users’ permissions on a case-by-case basis.

When you use OpenTelemetry SDKs to collect logs, metrics, and traces from infrastructure or an application, you’ll find many references to people using Grafana Agent and OpenTelemetry Collector. They start with an application or infrastructure that sends telemetry, and that data is sent to a collector, which then sends it to a backend like Grafana that may perform many functions, including visualization.

Observability isn’t just about watching for errors or monitoring for basic health signals. Instead, it goes deeper so you can understand the “why” behind the behaviors within your system. CI/CD observability plays a key part in that. It’s about gaining an in-depth view of the entire pipeline of your continuous integration and deployment systems — looking at every code check-in, every test, every build, and every deployment.

ObservabilityCON 2023 took place in London this week, showcasing all the latest and greatest trends in open source observability. Following the opening keynote, the event featured a range of breakout sessions — led by both Grafana Labs experts and members of the Grafana OSS community — that explored observability best practices and lessons learned.

The OpenTelemetry project provides many different components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, new users often find it hard to pick the right ones and configure them properly for their specific use cases. For this reason, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, which is a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components. Here at Grafana Labs, we are all-in on OpenTelemetry.