Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Moving Beyond SolarWinds: Building a Modern Observability Strategy

For years, platforms like SolarWinds have been a standard in IT environments. They helped teams answer a fundamental question: are systems up or down? That approach worked well when environments were more contained and predictable. The challenge is that most environments no longer operate that way. Hybrid infrastructure, cloud services, and tightly interconnected applications have changed what “visibility” needs to mean.

New: More control with Recovery Notices

We’ve added a new notification option to give you more control over how and when you get alerted: Recovery Notices. Until now, notifications were primarily focused on incidents – letting you know when something goes wrong. But we heard from many of you that not all alerts are equally useful. While some teams want full visibility across the entire lifecycle of an incident, others are mainly concerned with when a service goes down, not when it comes back up.

Forget user experience, the age of user extraction is here

Does it ever feel like the days of simple, user- and pocket-friendly digital services are now a bygone era? Is everything just a reminder of how things used to be better? Dramatic language and rose-tinted glasses aside, you would be naive not to notice that service providers are becoming increasingly predatory, especially when it comes to monetization. Ads are everywhere, privacy policies are questionable at best, and costs keep rising.

8 Signs Your Service Desk Automation Tool Has Become the Bottleneck

Most service desk automation problems get misdiagnosed. You see the ticket backlog, the manual work, and the slow incident response, and assume the issue is due to process, adoption, or staffing. But at some point, the math stops working. You’ve invested in a service desk automation tool, given it time to mature, built workflows around it, and the results still don’t match what was promised.

Instrumenting WordPress with OpenTelemetry: PHP Tracing, Browser RUM, and Error Capture in Production

WordPress powers 40% of the web but has no native observability story. Here's how to instrument it end-to-end with OpenTelemetry - PHP, browser RUM, and errors. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

No more monkey-patching: Better observability with tracing channels

Almost every production application uses a number of different tools and libraries,whether that’s a library to communicate with a database, a cache, or frameworks like Nest.js or Nitro. To be able to observe what’s going on in production, application developers reach out for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools like Sentry. But there’s an inherent problem: the performance data that APM tools need is most often not coming natively from the libraries themselves.

GrafanaCON 2026 announcements: A guide to all the latest news from Grafana Labs

GrafanaCON 2026 kicked off in Barcelona, which is a fitting city to reveal the latest updates in Grafana 13. In 2013, Grafana Labs Co-founder Torkel Ödegaard made the first commit for what would become Grafana while he was on vacation in the Catalan city. "I was traveling here for the Christmas holiday and I got a cold and spent most of the day in bed coding and working on Grafana," said Torkel during the opening keynote of GrafanaCON, our biggest community event of the year.

AI Observability in Grafana Cloud: A complete solution for monitoring your agentic workloads

The observability industry has developed great tools for using metrics, logs, traces, and profiles to monitor the cloud native applications that have dominated the last decade of software development. But when it comes to understanding what an AI system is actually doing, we’re often left reading raw conversations, guessing at quality, and reacting too late. And that’s a problem.