Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

How to share and analyze survey data (or other business metrics) in Grafana

Our annual Observability Survey provides some great insights on the state of industry and all things observability. And for the third edition of the survey, published last March, we wanted to bring the results into a Grafana dashboard—not just because we could, but because it was quite a nice way to interact with the data. After all, Grafana isn't just for IT observability. You can use it to monitor everything from BI data to lunar landings to pet pythons—and now, survey data.

Tail sampling vs. head sampling in distributed tracing

In this video, Grafana Labs' Robin Gustafsson (CEO for K6 + VP, Product) and Sean Porter (Distinguished Engineer) discuss the differences between head sampling and tail sampling approaches in distributed tracing. They explore why head sampling often amounts to sampling randomly and hoping for the best, while tail sampling — the approach used by Adaptive Traces in Grafana Cloud — allows you to intelligently capture the traces that actually matter to you.

Logging Best Practices (Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Call)

We’re back with a new Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Call episode, and this time we’re diving into logging with OpenTelemetry and Grafana Loki! Even better, we’re joined by two fantastic guests: Jack Berg, OTel logging expert, and Ed Welch, Loki guru. Getting both of them in one conversation makes for an amazing deep-dive into all things logging. Logs come in every shape and size, from simple CLI output to massive distributed systems generating petabytes of structured data. In this episode, we’ll talk about.

Capture high-value traces without managing a pipeline: Tail sampling with Adaptive Traces

Tracing is the richest observability signal in common use today. In distributed systems, it reveals how requests flow across multiple services, allowing you to uncover and address performance bottlenecks. Teams often scale back or abandon tracing altogether, however, because most successful requests produce redundant data that’s noisy and expensive to store.

Why OpenTelemetry instrumentation needs both eBPF and SDKs

As a vendor-neutral open standard, OpenTelemetry has become the default choice for application instrumentation. However, it’s important to remember that OpenTelemetry isn’t a single technology — it’s an ecosystem. Under the hood, it provides multiple options for instrumenting your applications. In this blog post, we explore two instrumentation approaches: OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation and runtime-specific OpenTelemetry SDKs, like the OpenTelemetry Java agent.

Instrumentation Hub: a guided, scalable way to roll out observability coverage without losing control

Getting started with observability in a modern, fast-moving environment is harder than it should be. Open-standards-based observability promises flexibility and vendor neutrality, but in practice it often introduces significant complexity and delays meaningful coverage by months or even years. Each layer of the stack requires its own instrumentation approach, and every technology, runtime, and library version comes with unique setup steps, tradeoffs, and rough edges.

The year in AI at Grafana Labs

2025 was the year we at Grafana Labs went all-in on AI—and boy, what a year it was. Not only did we establish and start to execute our overarching strategy (build actually useful AI), we also took one of our most exciting new features (Grafana Assistant) from idea to general availability in just nine months! Yes, there's no shortage of articles singing the praises of AI these days, but let's dispense with the hyperbole and focus on some actually useful content.