Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Grafana Drilldown apps gives you a queryless, point-and-click way to explore your metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. But finding an insight is only half the job—you still need to act on it. Previously, that meant leaving Drilldown, manually copying queries, and navigating through Grafana's dashboards, Alerting, and "Explore" interfaces to pick up where you left off.

In today's cloud-native environments, managing resource waste and optimizing costs can feel like a constant battle. Operators, along with their fearless FinOps teams, spend countless hours hunting down unused resources, deciphering complex telemetry data, and manually implementing code or configuration changes to try to reduce cloud costs. But what if you could automate the entire process, from identifying waste to implementing the fix, all based on actual production telemetry?

We're big proponents of OpenTelemetery, which has quickly become a new unified standard for delivering metrics, logs, traces, and even profiles. It's an essential component of Alloy, our popular telemetry agent, but we're also aware that some users would prefer to have a more "vanilla" OpenTelemetry experience.

Ben Avner is the Head of Ecosystem and Strategic Alliances at Apono, where he leads the company’s global partner strategy and technology alliances. He focuses on building and scaling strategic partnerships that drive product innovation, partner-influenced pipeline, and long-term growth. A former founder and engineer, Ben brings a strong technical foundation and a builder’s mindset, combined with experience across marketing, product partnerships, and go-to-market strategy.

While tracing is a critical component of any observability strategy, metrics — especially RED metrics (request rate, error rate, and duration) — are widely considered the gold standard for monitoring service health. Tempo, the open source, easy-to-use, and highly scalable distributed tracing backend, is well known in the OSS community for storing and querying traces. It can also, however, generate RED metrics directly from those traces using the optional metrics-generator component.

Observability isn’t just about collecting metrics and logs; it’s about proactively validating that your systems work as expected. Synthetic monitoring helps teams continuously test APIs, applications, and critical user journeys. But when those checks require the use of sensitive data, securely managing credentials becomes essential to maintain both reliability and security.