Grafana Labs

What does it mean to be a solutions engineer at Grafana Labs? Matt Simonsen, who’s been part of #TeamGrafana for 3 years, believes the goal is to *earn* a seat as a trusted advisor, not just to architect a solution, but to architect a win. The work is part architecture, part discovery, part stakeholder alignment. It means discovery calls to understand what isn't working. Demos. Migration sizing. Whiteboard sessions. Occasionally hopping on a plane. If you’re considering a role as an SE at Grafana Labs, check out Matt’s post and learn how you can set yourself up for success: https://lnkd.in/dVHkymk9

🔭 The Moon gives us plenty to marvel at... and observe. Tonight, we're joining moonwatchers around the world in looking up. And reflecting on the role Grafana played in lunar missions by JAXA: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Firefly Aerospace, and NASA with Intuitive Machines. It's still a pinch-me moment knowing Grafana helped these teams make history. JAXA: https://lnkd.in/eCc3NiNm Firefly Aerospace: https://lnkd.in/ehfp6ez5 NASA with Intuitive Machines: https://lnkd.in/ex6pjuY4 Happy International Observe the Moon Night! Wherever you are, enjoy the view.

HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise agents already emit OpenTelemetry data: distributed traces for every run phase, granular runtime metrics, and structured logs to stdout. You just need something to collect it. This guide shows how to point a self-hosted agent at Alloy and ship traces, metrics, and logs into Grafana Cloud — so you can actually see what's happening across your runs, not just in them. The full pipeline: HCP Terraform dispatches a run to a self-hosted agent → agent sends traces and metrics over OTLP and logs via the Docker Engine API → Alloy exports all three signals to Grafana Cloud. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/eE7H7uZ9

🎨 ICYMI, our new Graphviz panel (private preview) lets you describe process flows in DOT notation — payment pipelines, network weathermaps, runbook decision trees — and wire them straight to live data. No manual box-placing. No nudging connectors for an afternoon. You describe the graph; Graphviz handles the layout. ``` digraph { Checkout -> Authorization -> "Fraud Check" -> Settlement } ``` That's a complete, working diagram. Rename a node, add a branch — the layout re-flows automatically. Built on 30+ years of open source Graphviz. Available now in all editions: https://lnkd.in/e8bxVpAT

☁️ If your Cypress suite has tests that fail more often or run slower, it can be hard to figure out the pattern from a single job. Cypress already exposes everything you need through its plugin hooks. After each spec finishes, you get pass/fail counts, per-test durations, and states. This post walks through how to turn those into Prometheus metrics, push them through a Pushgateway, and let Alloy forward everything to Grafana Cloud Metrics — using nothing but the free tiers. The architecture: a Cypress hook converts results into metrics → Pushgateway holds them between runs → Alloy scrapes and remote-writes to Grafana Cloud Step-by-step instructions: https://lnkd.in/ezcrp5z9

Grateful to be featured in The Australian Financial Review this week, though the real story here isn't mine, it's ours. It's Raj deciding in 2008 that if he ever built another company, it would be with people he actually wanted to work with. It's Torkel, who built something in his own time that ended up mattering to millions of engineers. And it's the 1,600+ Grafanistas who've spent the last decade turning "we love this open-source project" into something millions of people rely on every day. Fitting timing, too. We just wrapped GrafanaFest in Vienna, where a lot of us got to stand in a room together and reflect on the company we've actually built. Not the valuation headline, but the people and the product decisions that got us here. That's the version of this story I'd rather tell. None of us had a grand plan. We just kept building the thing we wished existed, with people we trusted, one release at a time. Thanks to Iona and Lauren for the great conversation. Read more in AFR: https://lnkd.in/ghy2_5K6 Or listen to the interview on the How I Made It podcast: https://lnkd.in/gTvsZNyy

🛍️ Running an e-commerce business and need to see your Shopify data alongside other business-critical data? Learn how Thanos Karachalios connected Shopify to Grafana Cloud so his orders, revenue, and fulfillment data live on the same dashboard as his inventory room temperature and equipment uptime.

🦺 AI safety has been top of mind as agents are becoming part of the production toolchain. That's why... We're bringing Grafana Agent Observability's safety protections to OSS users through the agento11y CLI. Install, configure your agent, and stay protected! See the repo: https://lnkd.in/er7uceJ8

‼️ We're rolling out an update to custom labels in Synthetic Monitoring. If you currently use custom labels in Synthetic Monitoring, be sure to migrate by Mar 1, 2027. Until now, filtering a dashboard or scoping an alert by team meant joining `sm_check_info` against the metric you actually wanted to query. And remembering that `team` was really `label_team`. That friction added up fast when dozens of teams were running hundreds of checks. With this update, your custom labels appear exactly as you defined them, on every check metric and log — consistent with how labels work across the rest of Grafana Cloud. One alert rule can now route to the right team based on labels on the metric itself. Cost attribution by `team`, `environment`, or `service` works without extra steps. And teams adopting Synthetic Monitoring for the first time don't need to learn a separate label convention. After the migration deadline, legacy prefixed behavior will be sunset and any unmigrated stacks will be auto-migrated by Grafana Labs. More info: https://lnkd.in/eArmy2nz

🚀 Digital Experience Monitoring in Grafana Cloud received some major updates. Now, your teams can: ∙ Replay exactly what a user saw and did — mouse movements, DOM actions, and all — with Session Replay powered by Faro ∙ Correlate replays with Core Web Vitals, user actions, and traces ∙ Catch problems before users do with proactive synthetic checks against critical journeys ∙ Connect a frontend signal to the backend trace behind it Privacy is handled client-side by default. Masked data is never sent to Grafana Cloud. Here's the full walkthrough, including setup steps and video: https://lnkd.in/d-N8trYE