Grafana Labs, today at its ObservabilityCon event, unfurled a raft of additional offerings, including public previews of Explore Traces and Explore Profiles tools that make it simple to drill down into data without having to master a specific query language.
In addition, the company revealed it has acquired TailCtrl to drive the development of Adaptive Traces, an effort to extend an existing capability that Grafana Labs developed to enable identifying logs that are not being actively used.
Grafana Labs also unveiled a raft of tools for extending the open source OpenTelemetry framework to track machine learning experiments in addition to tools for observing large language models (LLMs) and monitoring graphical processor units (GPUs) using data collected from operating systems using extended Berkley Packet Filtering (eBPF).
The company also showcased an experimental example of infusing artificial intelligence (AI) into its incident management platform to provide a bot that uses LLMs to summarize and capture insights, along with the results of an effort to infuse AI technologies it gained last year with the acquisition of Asserts.ai. to improve microservices-based application performance, monitor Kubernetes workloads, monitor infrastructure and real user behavior, and simplify service level objective (SLO) management.
At the same time, Grafana Labs is now making generally available Cloud Provider Observability, an instance of its cloud platform specifically configured for managing and tracking usage of workloads deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud services, all in Grafana Cloud.
Grafana Labs has also combined its Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring tool and Grafana k6 load testing platform into a single offering in addition to adding a low code k6 Studio tool for creating tests along browser monitoring and a preview of a scripting monitoring tool.
Finally, Grafana Labs is launching a Startup Program, offering 50 eligible organizations up to $100,000 in Grafana Cloud credits for 12 months or until their next funding round. The program is designed for startups with less than $10 million in funding and fewer than 25 employees, though exceptions may be considered.
Company CTO Tom Wilkie said these tools are extensions of a portfolio of capabilities that Grafana Labs is adding to make its core data exploration and analysis platform more accessible. For example, Grafana Labs developed a similar set of Explore Metrics and Explore Logs tools, now generally available, to make it simpler to interrogate data in a way that also reduces the total cost of storing telemetry data by making it easier to identify inactive logs, noted Wilkie.
That’s critical, because as more organizations embrace observability many of them are starting to incur increased costs as they store more log data, he noted.
Overall, the goal is to make it simpler for DevOps teams to compose their own observability platform that is tuned to their specific needs rather than relying on a more curated approach, said Wilkie. That approach also lends itself better toward platform engineering teams that organizations are starting to build to centralize the management of IT, he added.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations have embraced observability to enable them to move beyond basic monitoring of pre-defined metrics, but as IT environments become more complex it’s clear legacy tools are not up to the current challenge.
