Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) are the backbone of modern software delivery, but there’s still limited visibility into their processes. Here’s how that’s changing with OpenTelemetry (OTel), and why those changes are so exciting.

Michal Vaško is a DevOps engineer at cloudWerkstatt, with a passion for open source technology and a deep love for observability. While operations or platform teams have long relied on visibility into metrics to react swiftly, the idea of doing the same thing with logs was once just a dream. Thankfully, Grafana Loki has revolutionized the logging stack, giving you the same level of visibility with logs that you get with metrics.

At its core, observability is about helping humans understand and optimize complex systems. It enables engineering teams to ask questions on the fly, and to learn not only when something goes wrong but why. Observability also allows organizations to proactively identify and address performance issues — before their end users even have a chance to notice.

At Grafana Labs, our No. 1 approach when building AI/ML tools is to enable humans (a.k.a. all of us!) to understand complex systems. In other words, we want to make observability still human, but less complicated. (Our second use case? Making social media more fun.) We believe that AI/ML tools in observability should work towards minimizing toil and the need for everyone in your organization to have the same deep domain knowledge about your increasingly complex stack.

Denis Gontcharov is a data consultant who helps aluminum smelters break down data barriers. For the past five years, he has supported the aluminum industry with IT and data services as an independent consultant. Denis also works as a Developer Advocate at the United Manufacturing Hub. Jeremy Theocharis is co-founder and CTO at United Manufacturing Hub. He is an expert in industrial IoT with over seven years of experience leading large-scale IIoT projects in various industries.

The Grafana 11.1 minor release comes on the heels of unveiling Grafana 11 at GrafanaCON, but it packs in some ease of use visualization improvements, updates to Grafana Alerting (I spy a new settings page), and some impactful changes to the overall accessibility of 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). 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.

Ron Dover is CTO and co-founder of Digma.ai, an IDE plugin for code runtime AI analysis to help accelerate development in complex code bases. Ron is a big believer in evidence-based development and a proponent of continuous feedback in all aspects of software engineering. Traditionally, software developers have relied on simple logs to understand code execution and troubleshoot issues.

When it comes to observability, we believe open source will win in the end. It’s a sentiment shared by a wide spectrum of users, whether they work in auto manufacturing, banking, or shipping. The U.S. federal government is yet another industry to prove this, showing that even those operating under the strictest security and compliance requirements see OSS as their preferred approach.

Today, we are excited to announce that we are releasing new code for the OpenTelemetry Datadog receiver as open source. This code allows users to translate Datadog metric formats into native OTLP format. These metrics can then be sent to any OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics system, whether it’s Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, or another backend database.