Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In Grafana Cloud, we offer a range of AI capabilities to support your observability needs, including a feature for forecasting on any of your metrics and coupling it with Grafana Alerting. This is critical functionality if you want to make the switch from reactive to proactive alerting, as troubleshooting a problem before it arises is an important part of modern observability.

Japanese organizations are focused on controlling costs and limiting complexity—and they might be getting ready to broaden their adoption at just the right time, according to analysis of a micro survey on observability recently conducted by Grafana Labs. Observability is an evolving space in Japan, and this is the first time Grafana Labs has run a Japanese version of our annual Observability Survey.

Grafana Tempo 2.8 is officially here, delivering new TraceQL features, performance improvements, and bug fixes, as well as some breaking changes. Watch the video below to learn more about the TraceQL features, or continue reading to get a quick overview of these and other updates. If you’re looking for something more in-depth for all of the changes that happened in this release, head over to the Grafana Tempo 2.8 release notes or the changelog.

If you’re working with metrics in Grafana Cloud, chances are you’ve come across DPM (data points per minute). It shows up in usage dashboards, invoice breakdowns, and occasionally pops up in Slack when your ingestion numbers start looking suspicious. DPM can also be seen in the Grafana Cloud billing and usage dashboard, which is available by default in every Grafana Cloud account. It helps you understand how much data you’re sending—and whether it’s more than you need.

Grafana Play is a free and publicly accessible sandbox environment that allows users to explore and learn Grafana without setting up their own instance. Grafana Play comes preloaded with ready-made sample dashboards, and showcases how to work with different data sources, create visualizations, and use advanced Grafana features.

On March 2, 2025, Firefly Aerospace made history. The company — a space services firm that offers safe, reliable, and economical access to space — completed the first fully successful lunar landing by a commercial provider with its Blue Ghost Mission 1. But behind the headlines and highlight reels was a team of dedicated engineers, years of preparation, and a mission control center outfitted with Grafana dashboards.

Databases are a crucial part of modern systems, which means database observability is incredibly important, too. However, gathering information on them can be complex, variable, and tricky to instrument in a consistent way. OpenTelemetry is helping to change that, and one of the most important aspects in making it work is a set of shared rules called semantic conventions.

In March, we announced that Grafana OnCall (OSS) had entered maintenance mode. However, OnCall’s development continues in Grafana Cloud as Grafana Cloud IRM, combining on-call management and incident response into one integrated solution. Many users told us they still want to self-host Grafana and rely on Grafana Alerting to detect potential issues early—but they also need to escalate and manage incidents using an incident response management (IRM) solution.

Synthetic monitoring is a vital practice to proactively track the health and performance of web applications. Instead of waiting for users to report problems, synthetic monitoring helps developers catch issues before they impact real users. One powerful type of synthetic monitoring is the browser check. These checks go beyond basic ping checks, simulating how a user would actually interact with your website’s interface.

At Grafana Labs, we’ve always believed that observability should be open and accessible — that belief extends beyond metrics, logs, and traces to the costs associated with managing observability at scale. That’s why we’re excited to share that we’ve adopted the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification ( FOCUS), a community-driven, open standard for cloud billing data.