Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Volkov Labs has been a longtime partner to Grafana Labs, with co-founder Mikhail Volkov contributing to Grafana in the early stages of the OSS project. On Sept. 26, the Florida-based company that recently created a suite of business intelligence (BI) plugins for Grafana announced it had been acquired. In light of the news, Grafana Labs committed to taking over the maintenance and development of their popular business intelligence (BI) plugin suite.

Wilfried Roset is an engineering manager who leads an SRE team and he is a Grafana Champion. Wilfried currently works at OVHcloud where he focuses on prioritizing sustainability, resilience, and industrialization to guarantee customer satisfaction. As an SRE Engineering Manager and a Grafana Champion, I believe a resilient and sustainable cloud experience begins with strong observability.

Context switching isn’t just inefficient—under pressure, it’s exhausting. It slows decision-making, increases the risk of mistakes, and makes even experienced engineers feel like they’re always a step behind the system they’re responsible for. At Grafana Labs, we want to build tools that meet you where you are. That's why we embedded Grafana Assistant, our context-aware AI assistant, directly in Grafana Cloud.

As part of the upcoming Grafana 13 release in April, we will be updating to React 19, the latest major version of the frontend library for building user interfaces. Grafana uses React as the core technology for its frontend UI and its vibrant ecosystem of plugins. This update ensures we stay aligned with the broader React ecosystem, and allows us to take advantage of ongoing performance enhancements and new functionality provided by React APIs.

Earlier this year we launched Grafana Cloud Fleet Management to address the pain that comes with managing scores of telemetry collectors across departments and environments. We've been excited to see how organizations are using it to manage collectors at scale, but we've also heard from users who aren't sure how Fleet Management fits with their existing infrastructure-as-code tooling. The good news is Fleet Management is designed specifically to complement—not replace—tools like Terraform.

For many teams, 2024 was the year of asking, “can OpenTelemetry do this?” In 2025, the community answered with a resounding “yes,” moving beyond experimentation to focus on what matters most in practice: stability, ease of use, and cross-project compatibility. That momentum now sets the stage for what’s to come for OpenTelemetry in 2026.

In engineering, there's a concept known as the Iron Triangle. With three sides—cost, quality, time—it's a framework intended to help you prioritize different aspects of project management Want fast, high-quality features? It'll cost you. Need to keep costs down while maintaining quality? That'll take time. And if you're trying to move fast and cheap? Well, good luck with quality. For years, this has been the brutal reality of running services on the web.

When you're on a software team, planning for the weeks and months to come is always a challenge. You have to balance deep feature backlogs, business and leadership requests, customer requests, and operational interruptions. Effective planning requires a way to prioritize the backlog, set realistic roadmap goals, and justify decisions.

Note: this post was co-authored by Nicholas Borg, 3CX Product Manager. 3CX provides a robust, flexible IP PBX platform used by organizations of all sizes to power their contact centers. It offers detailed call activity, agent performance metrics, and operational insights — all of which become even more powerful when visualized.

Even with a powerful database or visualization layer, performance can suffer if queries aren’t optimized or system settings aren’t tuned. The new Mimir Query Engine in Grafana Cloud improves query efficiency, but there are still best practices you can follow to keep dashboards fast and responsive—whether your data source is hosted in Grafana Cloud or running on-premises.