Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

Evaluating agents is hard. Verifying observability tasks is harder. Yes, AI agents have gotten dramatically and quantifiably better at coding and tool use, but observability presents a different kind of challenge. In a real incident, the hard part is rarely just writing a query. It's deciding which signal matters, figuring out whether a spike is noise or symptom, correlating metrics with logs and traces, and sometimes making a change in Grafana without breaking the dashboard another engineer depends on.

Who says 13 is unlucky? With the release of Grafana 13, we're giving the community the most streamlined, flexible, and intuitive Grafana experience yet. Unveiled during the opening keynote of GrafanaCON 2026, the latest major release is all about helping you get value from your data faster, whether you’re spinning up dashboards, operating Grafana at scale, or extending the platform as your requirements change. Download Grafana 13.

If you're running Databricks workloads, you've probably asked yourself these types of questions: How much is this costing me? Why did that job fail last night? Why are my dashboard queries suddenly slow? We've been there, too. Databricks is fantastic for data engineering, ML, and analytics. But once you start running jobs, pipelines, and SQL queries at scale, you need a way to keep tabs on what's happening. That's why we built the Databricks integration for Grafana Cloud.

Alerts are meant to help teams respond quickly to problems, but too often they arrive without enough context to be immediately useful. An alert that says “CPU usage is high” still leaves the on-call engineer asking critical follow-up questions: Which service? Which environment? Where do I look next? Validating the alert and triaging the situation is the first step for every engineer. It's a manual step that takes time, extending every potential incident.

When you identify CPU or memory spikes in your services, it’s critical to understand why they’re happening. But switching between tools or crafting complex queries can slow you down when trying to pinpoint a root cause. This is why we’re excited to share that Profiles Drilldown, an application that lets you easily explore profiling data through an intuitive, point-and-click interface (no queries required), is now integrated with Grafana Cloud Knowledge Graph.

The Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart is the easiest way to send metrics, logs, traces, and profiles from your Kubernetes clusters to Grafana Cloud (or a self-hosted Grafana stack). And version 4.0 is the biggest update the chart has ever received. Representing nearly six months of planning and development, it's designed to solve real pain points that users have hit as their monitoring setups have grown.

As teams scale, managing synthetic monitoring checks manually in the UI becomes difficult and error-prone. When you're dealing with dozens of checks across multiple environments, teams experience inconsistent configurations, lack of version control, and difficulty tracking changes.

For today's modern businesses, the data landscape demands security and flexibility. You need to connect your observability platform to rich, proprietary datasets that often reside in private networks without compromising security or managing complex network infrastructure. You may also face an extra layer of complexity in order to effectively query and visualize that data. Luckily, modern artificial intelligence tools have made these previously complicated processes much simpler.

In Grafana Cloud we use a simple yet generous formula that lets you query up to 100x your monthly ingested log volume in gigabytes for free. This works for the vast majority of our customers, but if you aren’t careful and strategic with your usage, you could find yourself with an overage bill.