Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Editor’s note: This blog originally published in May 2025 when Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana became available in public preview. It was updated in November 2025 to reflect general availability. The Grafanaverse just got a little bit bigger.

About two months ago, an incident at Grafana Labs was kicked off in typical fashion: A series of alerts were triggered, our on-call engineer acknowledged it on Slack, and the rest of the team quickly began hypothesizing about the potential culprit. But the way the incident was resolved was anything but typical. Yes, our internal team followed best practices to resolve the incident as quickly as possible.

Grafana Play is a free, publicly accessible sandbox environment where anyone can explore and learn about Grafana, no setup or sign-in required. It comes preloaded with sample dashboards demonstrating how to connect to data sources, build visualizations, and experiment with Grafana’s advanced features. Hosted on Grafana Cloud, Grafana Play has grown significantly over the years. With thousands of public dashboards, it’s now a go-to destination for Grafana learning and exploration.

It’s widely acknowledged that most application performance problems stem not from the application itself, but from the underlying database. Slow or inefficient database queries are often the primary cause of these issues, acting as the biggest driver of application performance incidents. If you’ve been troubleshooting slow API calls or sluggish services, chances are the root cause likely resides within your database layer.

For many organizations, periods of high customer activity are anything but relaxing. Events like Black Friday, product launches, or major sales can put intense strain on the software and infrastructure systems that support a company’s web applications. Without proactive performance testing, these moments can quickly turn into poor user experiences and lost revenue.

In 2022, we introduced Grafana Mimir, our open source, horizontally scalable, multi-tenant time series database (TSDB) designed for long-term storage of Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. Over the years, Mimir has become a go-to metrics backend within the open source community, with 30 project maintainers and more than 4.7k GitHub stars.

One of Grafana’s greatest strengths is its ability to provide a consistent monitoring experience for all your data sources. But not everyone wants to go through the process of transforming that data and setting up a data warehouse to make that happen, especially for complex analyses.

In May, we announced the public preview of Prometheus native histograms in Grafana Cloud, unlocking greater precision, ease of use, and compatibility for analyzing latency, duration, and other distributions. Since then, we’ve seen incredible adoption across industries—from financial services companies to e-commerce platforms. Last week, during PromCon EU 2025, the Prometheus developers announced that native histograms are now stable, after three years of intense testing and improvements.

Writing queries is one of Grafana’s most powerful features, but it can also be one of the most time-consuming. Whether you’re exploring logs or building new dashboards, you often find yourself and your team rewriting the same queries over and over again. This is why we rolled out saved queries, a feature that makes it easy for everyone on your team to save, share, and reuse queries, eliminating the need to start from scratch each time.

With the end of the year fast approaching, we want to let you know about some important dates for our upcoming release freezes. Our annual release freeze helps ensure stability for everyone during the holiday season, which is a critical time for many of our customers. This pause helps us protect our on-call teams and maintain a smooth experience for you.