Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

‘One small step for a man, but a huge leap for developers’ — me, when I realised how to observe my Backstage with OpenTelemetry. Backstage is often the “portal” through which we manage all our other systems, but who watches the watcher? Recently, we gave a KubeCon Talk, highlighting that monitoring Backstage itself is critical. When Backstage isn’t observable, it becomes a blind spot in your infrastructure.

Sigma rules have become the security team equivalent of LEGO bricks and systems. With LEGO, people can build whatever they can imagine by connecting different types of bricks. With Sigma Specification 2.0 rules, security teams can create vendor-agnostic detections without being limited by proprietary log formats. In response to the Sigma rules’ popularity, the team that built them updated them in August 2024, giving security teams new capabilities.

Legacy systems now falter against modern requirements like scalability, security, and emerging technologies such as AI, containers, and microservices. In fact, experts project that by 2026, 90% of current applications will need modernization to remain viable, signaling an urgent call for business leaders to respond. While rebuilding from scratch with the latest technology stack might seem appealing, this approach demands significant time and investment.

In May we’ve released powerful new features to help you stay ahead of outages and communicate status more effectively, focusing on expanding Early Warning Signals across our platform. Let’s dive into what’s new!

Data is the lifeblood of businesses the world over, from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise. Making sure that it’s available when you need it, secured for authorized use, and recoverable from faults is vital to operating data platforms, no matter where your business is on its cloud journey. This can only be achieved by putting the right data into the hands of the right people, in a timely way, to make the right decisions about how to manage that platform effectively.

AI to streamline software development workflows, from idea to operations.

Playbooks are nice. Results are better. This simple truth highlights a critical challenge in modern enterprises: while technical teams have mastered infrastructure automation with Ansible, they need more than just technical playbooks that can only be used by SMEs—they need comprehensive automation that drives measurable business outcomes.

At Grafana Labs, we’ve always believed that observability should be open and accessible — that belief extends beyond metrics, logs, and traces to the costs associated with managing observability at scale. That’s why we’re excited to share that we’ve adopted the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification ( FOCUS), a community-driven, open standard for cloud billing data.

Have you heard that Search Packs are now officially generally available?

Today’s IT environments are rarely confined to a single data center or a single cloud provider. Enterprises are embracing a mix of cloud platforms, virtual machines, and on-premises hardware to stay agile and competitive. This blended environment is known as hybrid IT infrastructure, and managing it effectively is key to keeping systems healthy, secure, and performing at their best.