Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

Alerts are only useful when you can quickly find and act on the right signal. That's why, over the past two years, we rebuilt Grafana Alerting’s UI to make it more reliable and efficient, especially at scale. The result: a faster, paginated alert rules page that handles tens of thousands of rules, with a powerful filter dropdown and saved searches so you can quickly get back to the views you care about most.

Matt Toback is the VP of Culture at Grafana Labs. We published our original company values back in December 2020. We were a young company, growing fast, and fully remote. Our values at the time were aspirational, and painted a picture of the kind of company we wanted to be. Those values did real work and they mattered. You could hear them used in everyday conversations, and they helped get us to where we are today. But growth has a way of revealing gaps.

Sometimes the biggest shifts in technology aren’t about collecting more data — they’re about who (or what) gets to act on it. In this episode of “Grafana’s Big Tent” podcast, host Tom Wilkie, Grafana Labs CTO, is joined by Spiros Xanthos, Founder & CEO of Resolve AI, Manoj Acharya, VP of Engineering for Observability at Grafana Labs, and Cyril Tovena, Principal Engineer on the Grafana Assistant team, to discuss agentic AI in observability.