When you're the on-call engineer and something breaks, you can quickly find yourself deep in a series of tools you don't regularly use—switching tabs, copying query results, and manually stitching together a picture of what's happening and why. People are increasingly turning to AI to get around this, but the results can be a mixed bag.

Modern applications can fail in many different ways, from performance regressions and frontend errors to systems that break under heavy load. Because no single testing or monitoring approach can catch every type of failure, effective reliability testing requires multiple layers that validate your application before, during, and after their release.

In January, we announced that Grafana Labs had assumed maintenance of the business intelligence (BI) plugins created by Volkov Labs, and committed to a six-month maintenance period. Today, we’re sharing an update: we're extending our maintenance commitment through the end of 2026. As announced earlier this year, that commitment includes maintaining compatibility with recent Grafana releases while handling bug fixes, security updates, and community contributions on a best-effort basis.

One of the primary reasons organizations adopt Grafana Cloud is to create a single pane of glass across the data they collect from self-hosted systems, cloud providers, and third-party platforms. Bringing those signals together enables richer correlations, reduces tool sprawl, and makes it easier for teams to understand what's happening across their environment. But as observability grows and becomes more centralized, access management becomes more important.

To meet community demand, we have restored the global workload overview in Rancher Manager. After previously removing the feature due to performance constraints, we prioritized user feedback and rebuilt it from the ground up. Powered by a new, optimized API, the updated UI is both highly scalable and resilient.

Many times, the hardest part of troubleshooting isn’t fixing the actual problem. It’s figuring out where to start. As engineers, it’s easy to lose count of how many times we’ve opened logs, then 10 metrics tabs, and another 10 tabs with trace queries, only to end up back in the logs trying to find a root cause.