Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Modern cloud-native applications and web browsers are highly complex, making it challenging to gain visibility into their performance. Without an effective way to track and measure frontend performance, it becomes difficult to monitor real user experiences, detect critical issues, assess website health, and ensure optimal functionality. But what if you could see exactly what your users are experiencing in real time?

We launched Adaptive Logs last year to help you optimize your log volumes and costs in Grafana Cloud, and we’ve been hard at work ever since making improvements based on your feedback. Over the past couple of months, we’ve delivered several new features to help reduce toil, apply recommendations with precision, and—what we’re most excited about—confidently optimize your log ingestion while still providing peace of mind to your end users!

As any good cook knows, if you want to create a top-notch dish, you have to use the best ingredients. So when the engineering team for Cookidoo — an online platform and app that features more than 80,000 guided recipes for the Thermomix, an all-in-one kitchen small appliance — realized the observability tool they were using to monitor the platform wasn’t delivering what they needed, they decided to switch to Grafana Cloud and OpenTelemetry.

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). In case you missed them, here’s our monthly round-up of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates.

In our increasingly serverless world, observability isn’t just a “nice to have”—it’s essential. Serverless functions such as AWS Lambda bring incredible benefits, but they also introduce complexities, especially around monitoring and debugging. In a previous article, I provided a quick, practical guide for sending AWS Lambda traces to Grafana Cloud using OpenTelemetry.

We’re all looking for ways to improve on our incident response. We investigate various metrics and methodologies—all in the name of making sure our customers see the reliable and performant systems we’ve sought to build. In fact, all these efforts are leading us, as an industry, to finally realize the power of surprising anomalous events in our systems. They give us an opportunity to reexamine our expectations and see how our models of the sociotechnical system differs from reality.

Many engineers would agree: migrating to a new observability platform can be a serious undertaking. But it’s also the perfect opportunity to step back, revisit some of the foundational practices that drive your observability strategy — and reap some major benefits, as a result. This was the case at SpotOn, a provider of restaurant point of sales systems and business software, which recently migrated from four disparate observability tools and consolidated on Grafana Cloud.

In recent years, we’ve seen many organizations migrate from legacy incident response tools to Grafana Cloud IRM — our unified incident response and on-call management application hosted on Grafana Cloud — as they look to improve reliability, reduce costs, and consolidate their tooling. To help guide those efforts, we offer several IRM migration tools that allow you to more seamlessly migrate away from those legacy solutions and start using Grafana Cloud IRM.

Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector with native support for Prometheus, is great for all sorts of needs, including shipping your Microsoft Azure metrics and logs to Grafana Cloud.

Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability is a real user monitoring (RUM) solution that provides immediate, clear, and actionable insights into the end-user experience of web applications. Understanding where those end users are located can provide valuable insights into frontend performance, error patterns, and overall user experience.