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By Matt Wimpelberg
For many development teams, a load test starts with a set of assumptions. You pick 100 virtual users because it sounds reasonable. You ramp for 30 seconds because that's what the tutorial showed. You set a 500ms threshold because it feels like a good target. The test passes, you ship the release, and production falls over at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday because your synthetic load never resembled how real users interact with your application.
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By Tiffany Jernigan
Tempo started with a simple goal: make distributed tracing easier to run at scale. As tracing adoption has grown, however, so have the challenges, including higher data volumes, more complex architectures, and increasing demand for real-time insights directly from traces. Over the last year, we’ve been evolving Tempo’s architecture to meet that moment. And today, we’re sharing the results of those efforts with the release of Tempo 3.0.
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By Beverly Buchanan
Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud comes out of the box with preconfigured alert rules that notify you about issues like CPU throttling, crash-looping pods, and nodes going offline. These rules are installed automatically when you set up the app, and they start evaluating immediately. But if you've recently reinstalled the Kubernetes Monitoring app and your alert notifications stopped arriving, or started looking different, you're not alone.
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By Kevin Minutti
The ability to schedule regular tasks, such as cron jobs, has been around for decades. So why are we still running the same AI prompts by hand every day? As you use Grafana Assistant, our AI-powered observability agent, to stay on top of the state of your system, you likely find yourself asking the same questions. Maybe you want to know what changed overnight, or whether yesterday's deployment hurt latency, or which dashboards or skills are drifting out of date.
Performance testing is critical to ensure your applications stay reliable under load, but writing the scripts themselves often feels like a chore. Most engineers already know the scenario they want to test; the hard part is translating that intent into a working performance test. Even experienced developers who use k6 can lose time looking up syntax, configuring load stages and thresholds, or debugging boilerplate code before they can run a meaningful test.
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By David Allen
Note: This post originally published in October 2023 and was updated in May 2026 to include new methods and options for embedding Grafana dashboards. Grafana dashboards are powerful and flexible tools for observing applications and infrastructure, so it’s no surprise we get a lot of questions from the community about how to embed them into their web applications.
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By Théo Crevon
For years, teams have relied on k6 to take a more proactive approach to performance testing, ensuring they can catch issues early and deliver more reliable user experiences. That approach has helped make k6 one of the most widely used performance testing tools in the open source community today, with more than 30k stars on GitHub. Last year, we introduced k6 1.0, a major release that brought TypeScript support, native extensions, revamped test insights, and production-grade stability guarantees.
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By Steven Dungan
Most platform and observability teams have logs they know are noise. These could be throwaway health check logs, forgotten DEBUG logs, or verbose INFO logs from little used services that only serve to inflate your bill. Regardless of what they contain and why they're there in the first place, the hard part is getting rid of them. Centralized teams want to easily and quickly prevent these logs from being ingested, without having to work with toilsome infrastructure change management to do so.
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By Jeremy Heller
So your database is slow. Now what? Grafana Cloud Database Observability already gives you visibility into your SQL queries with RED metrics, individual execution samples, wait event breakdowns, table schemas, and visual explain plans. But visibility is just the starting point. You can see that a query's P99 latency spiked, but what should you do about it? You can see wait events like wait/synch/mutex/innodb firing, but what does that actually mean?
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By William Dumont
When an unexpected alert fires these days, most engineers' first move is to ask their AI assistant for help.You ask why your checkout service is slow and the assistant gets to work, but it can't get any meaningful insights—at least not quickly—without the proper guidance. So, the next thing you know you're sharing deals about your existing data sources, the services you have running, how they connect, which labels and metrics matter, and on and on.
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By Grafana
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are missing one — and when it comes to testing and observing AI, Nicole van der Hoeven argues that missing rule changes everything: before a robot can avoid harm, obey orders, or protect itself, there has to be a Zeroth Law: a robot must be observable. Because if you can't see what a system is doing, you have no way of knowing whether it's following any rule at all.
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By Grafana
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs heard from over 1,300 engineers and leaders across 76 countries on the real-world role of AI in observability. The data reveals a sharp distinction between intelligence and autonomy — and a critical blind spot most teams have.
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By Grafana
Grafana AI Observability is our new database and platform for observing AI Agents. Over the past year at Grafana Labs, we built Agents and we needed a way to understand how they are performing, what are the costs associated with them, what's the error rate or time to the first token as well as how they are behaving. Grafana Staff Engineer, Ivana Hučková provides a deep dive demo on how Grafana AI Observability connects our experience building Agents with our experience building observability systems.
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By Grafana
Context Offloading is a pipeline solution for managing Observability with AI Agents. If you are building AI Agents that work with real data, the context window can very easily get filled with bloated context that the Agent does not really need. Sven demonstrates "Context Offloading", a solution that stores the JSON result and sends only the summary of the JSON blob, making the LLM loop performance much quicker and keeping your context window small.
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By Grafana
MCP vs CLI: which one should your AI agent actually use? We get into it with Grafana's cloud and OSS MCP servers and gcx.
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By Grafana
Grafana Assistant is going places you might not expect — including healthcare. Golden Grot winner Oren Lion from TeleTracking reveals how Grafana Cloud supports their systems that help keep patient care moving — and how Assistant enables teams to get from “what happened?” to “here’s why” faster. From moon landings to patient care, Grafana is everywhere. Congratulations to Oren, Chris Johnson, Mark Munson, and the entire TeleTracking team on winning this year's Golden Grot Award for Pioneering AI in Observability!
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By Grafana
This is an excerpt from a real AI team weekly meeting where we talk about the stuff we build and occasionally also demo them! In this one, Principal Software Engineer Sven Großmann demos how he integrated AI Observability into the OTel demo, complete with the guards feature he introduced last week, and Principal Software Engineer Yas Ekinci gives a rare glimpse of LLMSpec, the internal counterpart of the o11ybench benchmark that we use to evaluate Assistant.
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By Grafana
Tempo 3.0 introduces a major architectural shift that decouples the read and write paths, with Kafka handling durability on the write side and a new live store serving recent traces on the read side. Blocks are now written at a replication factor of one instead of three, significantly reducing storage overhead. This release also brings TraceQL metrics to general availability, adds comparison operators for filtering metric results at query time, and introduces a new Tempo CLI redact command for removing sensitive trace data on demand without waiting for retention to expire.
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By Grafana
In the May edition of the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart office hours, we discuss the version 4.1 release, the upcoming 4.2 feature release, and we discuss the upcoming deprecation of the 1.x and 2.0 versions.
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By Grafana
AI agents are only as useful as the context they can access. With gcx, your coding agents can connect to Grafana and query real-time production telemetry from your Cloud, Enterprise, or OSS environment. The best part: it avoids the upfront context bloat that can come with loading tools before you even send a prompt. gcx uses a CLI approach, so there’s zero token cost until your agent actually needs to run a query.
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Grafana provides a powerful and elegant way to create, explore, and share dashboards and data with your team and the world. Grafana is most commonly used for visualizing time series data for Internet infrastructure and application analytics but many use it in other domains including industrial sensors, home automation, weather, and process control.
Grafana has a robust plugin architecture built for extensibility. Visualize data from more than 40 data sources, including commercial databases and web vendors, and add new graph panels with rich data visualization options. There is built in support for many of the most popular time series data sources. It works with Graphite, Elasticsearch, Cloudwatch, Prometheus, InfluxDB and more.
Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana, the leading open source software for visualizing time series data. Grafana Labs helps users get the most out of Grafana, enabling them to take control of their unified monitoring and avoid vendor lock in and the spiraling costs of closed solutions.