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.

Observability has become essential to organizations of all sizes, helping them get deeper, better insights into the infrastructure and applications driving their businesses.

About every two months, the Grafana k6 team releases a new version of the open source load testing tool to deliver new features and further enhance the user experience. In case you missed them, here’s a recap of recent k6 releases and some of the exciting updates they brought to our user base. Many of the features highlighted in this post relate to new web APIs that the community has been asking for, and that are widely used by JavaScript developers.

If you’re already familiar with distributed tracing, you know that spans are the building blocks of traces. But are you sleeping on what span events can do for you? First, you may need a wake-up call as to what a span event even is. While spans represent units of work or operation within a trace, a span event is a unique point in time during the span’s duration.

Let’s cut to the chase: Managing metric volumes at scale is hard. In fact, when we asked the open source observability community about their biggest concerns in this year’s Grafana Labs Observability Survey, the top four responses — cost, complexity, cardinality, and signal-to-noise ratio — can all be tied back to exponential growth in telemetry data.

As a site reliability engineer, you need constant vigilance and a keen eye for detail if you want to manage your Kubernetes infrastructure effectively. As part of that effort, you need to see the historical data from your pods, nodes, and clusters — even after they’ve been deleted or recreated. Many SREs rely on kubectl for this, and while it’s indispensable for real-time Kubernetes management, it presents some significant challenges with historical data.

Identity providers (IdPs) such as Okta play a crucial role in enterprise environments by providing seamless authentication and authorization experiences for users accessing organizational resources. These interactions generate a massive volume of event logs, containing valuable information like user details, geographical locations, IP addresses, and more. These logs are essential for security teams, especially in operations, because they’re used to detect and respond to incidents effectively.