Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You add the OpenTelemetry Java agent, restart your app - and like magic, observability appears. But is it really magic? What’s actually enabled by default? What telemetry should you expect to see? What’s missing? And what might you want to tweak, tune, or even turn off?

In the February edition of the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart office hours, we discuss the version 3.8 release, the upcoming 4.0 release and features, and we discuss the upcoming deprecation of the 1.x and 2.0 versions.

SREs are famously skeptical of AI — so how do you convince them to trust agents in production? In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, Tom Wilkie talks with Spiros Xanthos (Resolve AI), Manoj Acharya (Grafana Labs), and Cyril Tovena (Grafana Assistant team) about agent-first observability. They unpack knowledge graphs, LLM reasoning, autonomous debugging, pricing models, and the “Claude Code moment” for observability. Is autonomous production ops closer than we think?

At today’s community call, we will hear from David Grant, one of the engineers who has brought a new component, the Block Builder, into Mimir. Using the Ingest Storage architecture in Mimir 3.0, the Block Builder takes over the block-building responsibility from the Ingester. This feature is experimental in Mimir today, but is rolling out to production inside of Grafana Labs now. This is a great time to introduce the component, discuss the motivation, and show where it fits in the larger architecture.

Grafana Campfire Community Calls are back. We are starting with *Back to the Basics.* Even though you heard it so many times, but some of you are either new to or not very experienced with terms such as monitoring, observability, metrics, tracing, profiling etc. The good news is that you're not alone, and we've got this!! This will be a perfect learning opportunity to gain understanding during this live call and ask questions if anything is not clear.

As the final minor release in the Grafana 12 series, 12.4 builds on our shift toward scalable, as-code workflows and a dramatically improved user experience. From bi-directional Git workflows to smarter dashboard layouts and stronger governance controls, this release is all about helping teams move faster with less friction.

Now in public preview, Dynamic dashboards includes new features and a revamped user experience that make it even easier to find the exact insights you need, when you need them.