Best of Grafana — June 2025

1. 1
   Article

   freeCodeCamp·44w

   How to Debug CI/CD Pipelines: A Handbook on Troubleshooting with Observability Tools

   A comprehensive guide to implementing observability in CI/CD pipelines using free and open-source tools. Covers setting up Grafana Loki and lightweight ELK stacks for log aggregation, creating unified logging strategies with correlation IDs, writing advanced LogQL and KQL queries for troubleshooting, integrating Prometheus metrics with logs, and building Grafana dashboards. Includes practical examples for debugging common pipeline failures like build errors, dependency issues, and flaky tests across GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and GitLab.

   61
2. 2
   Article

   Milan Jovanović·44w

   Monitoring .NET Applications with OpenTelemetry and Grafana

   Learn how to implement comprehensive observability for .NET applications using OpenTelemetry and Grafana Cloud. The guide covers installing OpenTelemetry packages, configuring automatic instrumentation for ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework, and other libraries, setting up OTLP export to Grafana Cloud, and viewing traces and logs in unified dashboards. This setup provides distributed tracing, log correlation, and monitoring capabilities that scale from single services to complex microservice architectures.

   40
3. 3
   Article

   Grafana Labs·44w

   Configure and customize Kubernetes Monitoring easier with Alloy Operator

   Grafana Labs introduces version 3.0 of the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart featuring Alloy Operator, which simplifies configuration by dynamically setting up telemetry data collection based on selected features. The new approach reduces the massive values.yaml file from nearly 3,000 lines and eliminates complex subchart management. Key improvements include automatic configuration of Alloy collectors when features are enabled, built-in tail sampling support for distributed tracing, and dynamic deployment of required Alloy instances. The operator uses Helm-based architecture to manage Alloy objects while maintaining security through proper encapsulation and minimal permissions.

   20
4. 4
   Article

   Grafana Labs·45w

   Grafana Tempo 2.8 release: memory improvements, new TraceQL features, and more

   Grafana Tempo 2.8 introduces significant memory improvements for compactors, reducing memory usage by over 50% in high-traffic environments. New TraceQL features include query hints for retrieving most recent results, parent span ID searches, sum_over_time metrics function, and topk/bottomk functions for better cardinality control. The release includes breaking changes such as removal of serverless features, default HTTP port change from 80 to 3200, and configuration parameter renaming. Future developments include RF1 rearchitecture rollout and LLM integration through a Tempo MCP server.

   10