Grafana Assistant is an AI-powered tool now available in public preview for Grafana Cloud users, designed to streamline the onboarding process for teams using the platform. It aids users in learning observability concepts, comparing features from different tools, and providing context-aware answers to enhance their experience. By offering tailored guidance and interactive tutorials, Grafana Assistant aims to help users quickly and effectively adopt Grafana for their observability needs.

Grafana Alloy, the OpenTelemetry Collector distribution launched a year ago, has seen significant adoption and development, now supporting over 525,000 active instances. The article highlights Alloy's unique capabilities, including native pipelines for both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, live debugging features, and Fleet Management for centralized control in Grafana Cloud. Future enhancements are focused on aligning with OpenTelemetry standards and improving user experience for debugging and configuration.

Grafana Labs is inviting participants to take part in their fourth annual Observability Survey, aimed at understanding the current state of observability in the industry. The survey will explore topics such as AI's role, open standards, and community satisfaction, with participants having a chance to win swag as a thank you for their input. Results will be shared transparently, allowing for community interaction with the data.

Grafana has updated its Prometheus data source to better align with specific cloud services, deprecating AWS and Microsoft Azure authentication in favor of dedicated plugins for Amazon and Azure. This move reflects Grafana's commitment to a "big tent" philosophy, emphasizing interoperability and tailored solutions for diverse observability tools while continuing to support the open-source community.

Grafana Cloud Traces now supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling users to leverage LLM-powered tools like Claude Code for enhanced analysis of tracing data. This integration simplifies the exploration of service interactions and helps in diagnosing issues by providing actionable insights from distributed tracing data. A step-by-step guide is included for connecting Claude Code to Grafana Cloud Traces.

Grafana Labs has introduced new data sources to enhance its observability platform, allowing users to visualize and analyze data from various applications and databases, including Amazon Aurora, Zendesk, and Azure CosmosDB. These updates, showcased at GrafanaCON 2025, aim to unify data querying and visualization from disparate systems within a centralized Grafana dashboard.

Goutham Veeramachaneni discusses how Beyla, an open-source eBPF-based instrumentation tool, simplifies monitoring in homelabs by providing consistent observability across diverse applications without requiring extensive manual coding. By leveraging eBPF and OpenTelemetry, Beyla enables users to collect telemetry data effortlessly, making it easier to address challenges in observability for both personal and production environments.

Grafana Beyla, an open source eBPF-based auto-instrumentation tool, can be integrated with Amazon ECS to enhance application observability without modifying application code. The article details the configuration steps necessary to run Beyla as a sidecar in ECS tasks, specifically leveraging Grafana Alloy for telemetry data management, enabling deep visibility into containerized workloads.

Grafana Beyla 2.5 introduces significant updates built on OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation, including support for MongoDB protocols, JSON-RPC for Go applications, manual span capabilities, enhanced NodeJS distributed tracing, and a new survey mode for service discovery. These features aim to improve observability and maintain compatibility within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem while allowing community contributions.

Learn how to utilize OpenTelemetry tracing through an interactive grand strategy game called Game of Traces, designed to help engineers grasp observability concepts. Players capture villages and manage resources while tracking interactions between services, showcasing how traces reveal the state of operations within a microservice architecture. The game leverages the Grafana LGTM Stack to illustrate telemetry signals in action.

Grafana Traces Drilldown is now generally available, offering a queryless experience for tracing data that enables faster root-cause analysis in microservices environments. With features like seamless navigation between metrics and traces, built-in investigative tools, and real-time analysis capabilities, it streamlines the process for incident responders and developers to quickly identify and resolve issues. Recent updates include integrated exemplars and TraceQL streaming for improved user experience and efficiency.