Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Lightweight Open-Source APM with OTel Demo (Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Call)

We’re back with the second Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Call! Join us as we continue exploring how to get observability into your apps and infrastructure with Grafana, powered by OpenTelemetry. In this session, we’ll walk through the basics of application monitoring using the OpenTelemetry Demo — a realistic example of a distributed system built on a fully open-source stack: Prometheus, Jaeger, and OpenSearch, with dashboards powered by Grafana.

AI Isn't Here to Replace Your Dashboard... Yet

Non-deterministic UIs are the future and will replace your dashboards, but they’re not here yet. So until then, we’re stuck with conversational interfaces. In an effort to try and describe what I consider the future of UIs to look like, I wrote about how you (and I) have been designing dashboards wrong. The core insight was that we've been designing for static representations of data that sit on a TV in the office, when the actual use case is someone at a desk using them to debug an issue.

Grafana Data Visualization Update: Panel Time Settings & Time Comparison in 12.3

The new panel time settings drawer gives you greater control over time ranges and shifts at the panel level without editing the dashboard. The time comparison feature, in particular, was a request from the community, and allows you to easily perform time-based (for example, month-over-month) comparative analyses in a single view. This eliminates the need to duplicate panels or dashboards to perform trend tracking and performance benchmarking.

Grafana 12.3 release: Interactive learning experiences, new and improved logs visualizations, and more

Grafana 12.3 is here, delivering new features for interactive learning, deeper insights into logging data, and so much more. Overall, a big theme in the latest minor release is to make data exploration easier, faster, and more customizable. Grafana 12.3: Download now! Below are just some of the highlights from Grafana 12.3. If you want to explore all the latest updates, please refer to the changelog or our What’s New documentation, and be sure to check out the TL;DR video below.

Monitor SolarWinds in Grafana: Demo + Setup

Matt from Grafana’s Enterprise Data Sources team demos the SolarWinds plugin: URL/credentials setup, TLS options, health check, and built-in dashboards. See how to query SolarWinds data with SWQL in Grafana and where to learn more (docs + SolarWinds SWQL resources). As of Nov 19, 2025, this is available in public preview in Grafana Cloud (including the free tier) and Grafana Enterprise.

How to pair Grafana Drilldown with Loki for faster logging insights

Our logs can tell us so much about the state of our systems, but they can also be a bit overwhelming. Yes, Grafana Loki—and, by extension, Grafana Cloud Logs, which is powered by Loki—reimagined the way log aggregation systems could meet modern engineering demands, but logs, by their very nature, are still voluminous.

Azure Monitor offers Grafana dashboards natively for immediate, real-time operational monitoring

Editor’s note: This blog originally published in May 2025 when Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana became available in public preview. It was updated in November 2025 to reflect general availability. The Grafanaverse just got a little bit bigger.

A tale of two incident responses: How our AI assistant found the root cause 3.5x faster

About two months ago, an incident at Grafana Labs was kicked off in typical fashion: A series of alerts were triggered, our on-call engineer acknowledged it on Slack, and the rest of the team quickly began hypothesizing about the potential culprit. But the way the incident was resolved was anything but typical. Yes, our internal team followed best practices to resolve the incident as quickly as possible.