Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This time, we're diving into a critical component for operational excellence: vmalert. Effective alerting is the backbone of proactive monitoring, enabling teams to detect and respond to issues swiftly before they impact users. But setting up truly effective alerting – alerts that are reliable, actionable, and low-noise – requires understanding the tools and best practices.

How can we send less data without losing information? Sampling removes duplication among distributed traces, while keeping all the interesting ones. See how this works with Honeycomb and Refinery.

Learn how to set up browser checks using Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring. In this video, we walk through how to create a browser check and analyze test results. Browser checks simulate real user interactions to track critical workflows and catch issues early.

Build funnels directly on your traces and get instant answers to questions like: What fraction of spans made it from event A to event B? Between which spans are most requests failing? What is the latency between key spans? Traditional observability tools let you inspect traces and spans, but they can’t aggregate or analyze how requests flow across multiple services or stages in your system. In asynchronous, distributed architectures, the root span rarely tells the full story-and there’s no way to measure conversion, drop-off, or latency between arbitrary steps across all traces.