So you had a great day playing with really awesome new tech, solving big business challenges, and feeling like you really nailed it. Then you wake up the next day to an alert from Azure telling you you've blown your monthly budget and its only the first week of the month. We've all been there... right? Using any cloud service comes with a cost, but for most services the budget risk is low. Cost calculated daily isn't a problem when usage is predictable, but not everything works like that.

Organizations around the world use Microsoft Azure to power their businesses. The cloud computing platform includes hundreds of products and services organizations can use to build and manage applications, but monitoring those environments can often feel like navigating a maze of fragmented data, tools, and processes.

Grafana’s extensibility has always been one of the keys to its success. It comes with a wide range of data sources that allow you to query your data no matter where it lives, visualizations to help you quickly make sense of that data, and apps that can provide complete observability solutions, all in a single package.

Logs play a critical role in observability, but they do come with their own challenges. Grafana Loki, our horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system, addresses these challenges head on, giving you an open source tool that’s both cost effective and easy to operate.

One of the most interesting stories in the dashboarding space over the past year or so has been the emergence of the Perses project. This is an open source project which not only provides a platform for dashboard creation, but also sets itself the very ambitious target of defining a common standard for dashboards as code. As a SquaredUp user, you may be wondering why we might want to talk about a potentially competing technology. Well, obviously, being SquaredUp, dashboards are in our DNA.

In the evolving and changing business landscape that demands the management of assets, availing them in support to operational success is associated with immense basic asset management need. It is no longer around tracking and maintaining assets but is about providing organizations within actionable insights useful to optimize usage, reduce costs, and thus improve decision-making.

This year Grafana Mimir — the open source, horizontally scalable, multi-tenant time series database (TSDB) — will celebrate its third anniversary. Over the years, Mimir has become the go-to, Prometheus-compatible metrics backend within the open source community, with 29 maintainers and more than 4.6k GitHub stars. Since introducing Mimir, we’ve worked hard to deliver on our promise of making it the most scalable and performant open source TSDB in the world.

When we introduced the Explore apps suite for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles last year at ObservabilityCON 2024, our goal was simple: offer a queryless, point-and-click experience so you can quickly find insights in your observability data—no queries or complicated syntax required. Our commitment to that goal remains unchanged, but we’re excited to announce that the Explore apps have a new name: Grafana Drilldown.