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). And this month, on the heels of ObservabilityCON 2024 — our flagship observability event — we have no shortage of updates to share.

There are a lot of factors that go into choosing an observability solution. And even after all that careful consideration, sometimes the platform you initially invest in doesn’t meet your needs, especially as your organization grows and evolves. For that very reason, we’ve seen users begin their observability journeys with another tool, and then decide to migrate to Grafana Cloud, our fully managed cloud-hosted observability platform.

Doug Tidwell is the Director of Content at Altinity, responsible for creating useful content for ClickHouse users in general and Altinity customers in particular. He has more than 30 years of experience in databases, CI/CD systems, development tools, and middleware. When it comes to visualizing, monitoring, and logging ClickHouse clusters, there’s no easier way to accomplish all three than with Grafana Cloud, the open and composable observability stack powered by open source.

The OpenTelemetry (OTel) project offers numerous components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, this flexibility can be overwhelming, and new users often struggle to choose the right components and configure them properly for their specific use cases. To address this, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components.

One of the biggest advantages of the OpenTelemetry project is its vendor neutrality — something that many community members appreciate, especially if they’ve spent huge amounts of time migrating from one commercial vendor to another. Vendor neutrality also happens to be a core element of our big tent philosophy here at Grafana Labs. We realize, however, that this neutrality can have its limits when it comes to real-world use cases.

Earlier this year, we were thrilled to announce that Catchpoint is now available as an Enterprise data source for Grafana! With the public preview release of the Catchpoint Enterprise data source, you can seamlessly bring Catchpoint’s extensive Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) and Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) capabilities into your Grafana dashboards, enhancing your ability to visualize and analyze performance metrics in real-time.

If you’re looking to simplify user access and permissions in your Grafana instance, then this blog post is for you.That’s because we’re going to walk through how to set up a streamlined system for managing user permissions with Grafana teams. We’ll focus on Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) as our user repository and identity provider, but these steps can be adapted to other identity providers as well, including Okta and Keycloak.

A year ago we rebuilt our alert rule state history, using Grafana Loki for storage and updating the UI to display a timeline of all state changes of an alert rule. As a result, users can now conduct better root cause analysis by going down to the level of an alert rule and seeing when certain alert instances started or stopped firing. But we aren’t stopping there. To ensure system stability and avert outages, you also need one place to see the state history for all the alerts in your system.

Grafana Tempo 2.6 is here with performance improvements and buckets of new TraceQL features! Watch the video above for an overview of the new TraceQL features, or continue reading to get a quick overview of the latest updates in Tempo. If you’re looking for something more in-depth, don’t hesitate to jump into the Grafana Tempo 2.6 release notes or the changelog.

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 Grafana Enterprise data sources.