Best of Grafana Labs — April 2026

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   Article

   Grafana Labs·7w

   Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart v4: Biggest update ever!

   Grafana's Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart v4 is a major overhaul addressing real pain points from v3. Key changes include: converting destinations and collectors from lists to maps (enabling proper multi-file merging and named overrides), replacing hard-coded collector names with user-defined collectors using composable presets, making telemetry service deployments explicit to avoid surprise duplicates, splitting the overloaded clusterMetrics feature into three focused features, separating pod log collection methods into distinct features with native OTLP support, replacing the bulk labelsToKeep approach with explicit opt-in label declarations (reducing memory usage), and allowing granular control over individual profiler types. A migration tool is available to convert v3 values files to v4 format automatically.

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2. 2
   Article

   Grafana Labs·8w

   Observability in Go: Where to start and what matters most

   Engineers from Grafana Labs and Isovalent discuss practical observability strategies for Go systems. The conversation covers starting with logs and deriving metrics from them (e.g., counting panics), when to reach for distributed tracing and how context propagation works, Go's error handling tradeoffs for observability, effective use of pprof for CPU and memory profiling (including common pitfalls like profiling when the bottleneck is actually I/O wait), and how eBPF enables visibility into kernel-level behavior beyond what user-space instrumentation can provide.

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3. 3
   Article

   Grafana Labs·6w

   Introducing Pyroscope 2.0: faster, more cost-effective continuous profiling at scale

   Pyroscope 2.0 is a ground-up rearchitecture of the open source continuous profiling database. Key changes include eliminating write-path replication (each profile written once to object storage instead of 3x), data co-location that reduces symbol storage by up to 95%, and a fully stateless read path enabling elastic query scaling. Rollouts that previously took 8-12 hours now complete in minutes. The new architecture also enables metrics derived from profiles, individual profile inspection, and heatmap queries. Pyroscope 2.0 has been running in Grafana Cloud since April 2025, processing 19.5PB of data. Native OTLP profiling support is included. Object storage is now required for distributed deployments.

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