Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For many teams, 2024 was the year of asking, “can OpenTelemetry do this?” In 2025, the community answered with a resounding “yes,” moving beyond experimentation to focus on what matters most in practice: stability, ease of use, and cross-project compatibility. That momentum now sets the stage for what’s to come for OpenTelemetry in 2026.

In engineering, there's a concept known as the Iron Triangle. With three sides—cost, quality, time—it's a framework intended to help you prioritize different aspects of project management Want fast, high-quality features? It'll cost you. Need to keep costs down while maintaining quality? That'll take time. And if you're trying to move fast and cheap? Well, good luck with quality. For years, this has been the brutal reality of running services on the web.

When you're on a software team, planning for the weeks and months to come is always a challenge. You have to balance deep feature backlogs, business and leadership requests, customer requests, and operational interruptions. Effective planning requires a way to prioritize the backlog, set realistic roadmap goals, and justify decisions.

Even with a powerful database or visualization layer, performance can suffer if queries aren’t optimized or system settings aren’t tuned. The new Mimir Query Engine in Grafana Cloud improves query efficiency, but there are still best practices you can follow to keep dashboards fast and responsive—whether your data source is hosted in Grafana Cloud or running on-premises.

Note: this post was co-authored by Nicholas Borg, 3CX Product Manager. 3CX provides a robust, flexible IP PBX platform used by organizations of all sizes to power their contact centers. It offers detailed call activity, agent performance metrics, and operational insights — all of which become even more powerful when visualized.

After a decade of dashboards, alerts, and ever-expanding telemetry pipelines, observability is changing. No longer just the domain of engineering, the most innovative organizations are extending observability to all areas of the business to better understand system behavior, emerging risks, and customer impact. At the same time, rising cloud costs and increasing complexity are forcing organizations to be more intentional about what they observe and why.

Sometimes the most important engineering work starts with a deceptively simple question. Not “What’s the best dashboard layout?” or “How many Ts are in Matt?” (still contested), but something much more fundamental: What if the read path and the write path didn’t have to share the same fate?

You know the situation: You're in a meeting and your alerts start to go off, but no one on the other side of the camera knows why you have to abruptly drop from the call. What if, instead, you had a robot in the background of your Zoom meeting that started to blink when those same alerts went off? You could just point to it, type in the chat "I have to drop," and off you'd go.

Let's talk about being new. Four months ago, I joined Grafana Labs as a senior solutions engineer. It wasn’t just a new company, it was a new industry. I came from the visual workspace provider Miro, where I was comfortable doing discovery and talking about visual collaboration and innovation. But stepping into observability? I was in the deep end. And let me tell you, the imposter syndrome was real. Everyone around me was fluent in this language of metrics, logs, and traces.

Dawid Dębowski is a software engineer at G2A.COM and a Grafana Champion. Holding an MS of Computer Science, Dawid’s main fields of interest related to observability are PromQL and data visualizations using Grafana. If you’ve ever worked with custom metrics in a Prometheus environment, you've probably heard about something called "high cardinality"—or at least I hope you have.