Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As we gear up for Grafana 13, the next major release of the open source data visualization platform that we’ll announce at GrafanaCON this April, our engineering team is still shipping some powerful new features along the way. Case in point: Grafana 12.4 is officially here, and there’s a lot to be excited about. The latest minor release includes a ton of updates that help you build and design dashboards faster than ever, as well as manage and scale those dashboards seamlessly over time.

If you've ever rolled out Grafana Cloud to a growing engineering organization, this pattern may sound familiar: Everything feels simple at first. You invite a few teammates, give them access, and dashboards start appearing. Then the team grows. Then the number of stacks grows. Over time, a model that once felt fast and empowering starts to feel risky, difficult to understand, and even harder to undo. This post is about avoiding that moment.

The internet is full of fascinating data just waiting to be visualized and queried. And with the latest update to Grafana Cloud, you can start doing it in minutes. Through public APIs, you can access information about global earthquake activity, weather forecasts, music catalogs, and millions of other datasets. And then there's all the data that sits inside company APIs, partner services, and internal platforms that power everyday products and operations.

At Grafana Labs, we are fully committed to the open source OpenTelemetry project and are actively engaged with the OTel community. Many Grafanistas spend a large proportion of their time contributing directly to OpenTelemetry upstream projects, helping make observability more powerful, reliable, and accessible for everyone as part of our big tent philosophy.

Sometimes the biggest challenges in software aren’t about code — they’re about consensus. What do we call things? What do we standardize? And how do you evolve a system that thousands of companies depend on without breaking everything along the way?

Many critical services run inside private networks, where traditional monitoring tools and practices can’t offer full visibility. This makes it difficult to validate service availability and performance before problems impact your users. Synthetic Monitoring — a Grafana Cloud solution that helps you proactively monitor the performance of your applications and services — addresses this gap with a feature known as private probes.

Some questions in engineering never go away. Here’s one that every team eventually confronts: Do we roll up our sleeves and build the tooling ourselves, or do we buy something built for us? It’s a choice that has the power to speed teams up or hold them back. With the rise of AI-powered observability, this familiar software dilemma has re-emerged with higher stakes and faster-moving technology.

Continuous profiling offers deep visibility into production environments, revealing exactly how applications consume CPU and memory. It’s the go-to observability practice for directly connecting system behavior and performance to specific lines of code. But when teams consider deploying continuous profiling more broadly, a common question comes up: what’s the overhead? Is it safe to run continuous profiling on my production services 24/7, or does the cost outweigh the benefits?

Note: This blog post originally published in May 2025 and was updated in February 2026 to reflect that Git Sync is now available in public preview in Grafana Cloud. As your Grafana instance scales, so does the challenge of maintaining dashboards. Managing dozens—or hundreds—of dashboards through the UI alone can quickly become overwhelming. Tracking changes gets murky, dashboards multiply, and consistency suffers.

Grafana Assistant is the most general-purpose tool we’ve delivered since dashboards. People use our Grafana Cloud LLM to understand unfamiliar areas of their stacks, generate dashboards and beautiful visualizations out of thin air, build queries, and support investigations.