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.

Let’s imagine a scenario: you use OpenTelemetry, and your observability backend runs on several hosts. You collect data on application latency, and notice a recent increase that you want to investigate. But how will you know which host caused the degradation? This is exactly where OpenTelmetry resources come in. In the context of OpenTelemetry, a resource represents the entity producing the telemetry data, such as a container, host, process, service, or operating system.

While some monitoring tools excel at a specific task, observability works best when you have a holistic view of your system. You need a platform capable of working with all of your telemetry collectively, otherwise you can end up with a complex, inefficient, and expensive collection of incongruent, siloed tools. That’s what one team at Dell Technologies realized before they made a switch to Grafana Cloud last year.