Note: The original version of this blog post published on ;login: on February 24, 2025. When architecting the flow of observability data such as logs, metrics, traces or profiles, you’ve likely noticed that most solutions ask you to deploy an agent or collector. Understandably, you might be hesitant to deploy yet another application just so you can get your data into your storage system of choice.

Most engineering teams today have a multiplicity of tools to meet all of the different challenges they face. Some people characterize this as a problem and describe it as 'tool sprawl'. At SquaredUp, we just see it as a fact of life that no tool can excel at every job and engineers will want to choose the best tool for each task. Many companies have multiple toolchains spread across different teams and departments.

You're reviewing your production metrics when suddenly an error spike appears on your dashboard. Your immediate thought isn't "how do I build a new view to investigate this?" but rather "how do I find out the cause quickly?" This is exactly what happened to one of our engineering teams last month when they spotted an unusual pattern in their API response times. Instead of running ad-hoc queries from scratch, they turned to a custom dashboard they had built after a past incident.

Our engineering team is hard at work on Grafana 12, the next major release of the open source data visualization platform that we’re launching at GrafanaCON this May, but in the meantime, Grafana 11.6 is officially here — and there’s a lot to be excited about. The latest minor release delivers a number of new dashboarding features, including one-click data links and actions, along with other notable updates related to security, alerting, and more.

In the world of observability, data is only as valuable as your ability to interact with it. That’s why we’re introducing Global Dashboard Parameters, a new Lumigo feature that empowers you to filter and explore your data across traces, logs, and metrics more dynamically than ever before.

Across companies of all shapes and sizes, observability practices are maturing and getting attention at the highest levels. At the same time, cost and complexity continue to hinder efforts as teams look to emerging tools to help simplify their processes in hopes of better outcomes. With so much in flux, we went into our third annual Observability Survey hoping to get a window into the ways the community is approaching observability and where it wants it to go next.