Grafana Labs Unveils Breakthroughs in Full-Stack and Database Observability
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Grafana Labs Unveils Breakthroughs in Full-Stack and Database ObservabilityLONDON, October 8, 2025 – Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, today announced major advancements that make observability simpler, faster, and more accessible at ObservabilityCON 2025. The new capabilities — spanning full-stack observability, database query analysis, open standards, and service-centric alerting — are designed to help every engineer, from developers to SREs, reduce complexity and deliver reliability at scale.
Observability has historically been costly, siloed, and difficult to scale. In fact, Grafana Labs’ 2025 Observability Survey found that 39% of respondents point to complexity as their biggest observability obstacle. With the growth of distributed systems and the rise of AI, teams are under even more pressure to connect infrastructure reliability with business outcomes, while also managing rising costs and skills gaps. Grafana Labs’ new updates, in addition to the introduction of AI-driven tools Grafana Assistant and Assistant Investigations, and completion of the Adaptive Telemetry suite, aim to help teams overcome these challenges.
Full-Stack Observability Powered by the Grafana Cloud Knowledge Graph
Systems today are more vast and complex than ever before. It’s no longer enough to monitor applications or infrastructure in isolation – organizations need observability across the entire stack. That’s where the Grafana Cloud Knowledge Graph (formerly Asserts) comes in. The knowledge graph, built into Grafana Cloud’s out-of-the-box experiences like Application Observability and Kubernetes Monitoring, connects metrics, logs, traces, and profiles into a single intelligent map of systems’ apps, databases, nodes, and more, so that instead of chasing scattered dashboards, teams gain:
- Unified, intelligent workflows: The Entity Catalog automatically discovers and maps all services and dependencies, surfacing curated dashboards and real-time health insights without requiring deep PromQL expertise.
- Faster root cause analysis: The new Root Cause Analysis Workbench (RCA Workbench) consolidates anomalies, dependencies, and timelines into a single view. Now integrated with Grafana Assistant, teams can turn 30-minute war rooms into 3-minute diagnoses.
- Out-of-the-box insights: When used alongside Application Observability, the knowledge graph provides built-in intelligence for Kubernetes, databases, and cloud services, reducing alert fatigue, shortening MTTR, and empowering engineers to troubleshoot effectively.
- Bring Your Own Knowledge (BYOK): Teams can integrate existing dashboards, alerts, and labels into the knowledge graph. Democratize expertise by layering custom context alongside out-of-the-box insights, giving everyone a shared understanding of system behavior and state during RCA.
“With Application Observability powered by the knowledge graph, we’re delivering true full-stack observability,” said Manoj Archaya, VP of Engineering at Grafana Labs. “From infrastructure to applications, every signal is connected, every anomaly is contextualized, and every team — from developers to SREs — can move from reactive firefighting to proactive reliability.”
Breaking Open the Black Box With Database Observability
More than half of all application performance issues start in the database, yet traditional tools stop at “the database is slow.” Grafana Cloud’s new Database Observability breaks open the black box, delivering query-level visibility and AI-powered optimization that make database troubleshooting faster and easier.
Key capabilities include:
- Full Query Visibility: Track every query across databases, with execution time, wait events, and error rates.
- Faster Root Cause: Correlate queries with application and infrastructure signals in just a few clicks.
- Deep Diagnostics: Drill into execution plans, schema details, and indexes to pinpoint inefficiencies.
- Actionable Optimization: AI-powered recommendations with ready-to-run code.
“The Database Observability feature developed by Grafana Labs represents a significant advancement in database observability,” said Alexandre Magno, Senior Manager, Pismo. “With this solution, data analysis becomes much simpler and more efficient, as the tool synthesizes complex information into intuitive dashboards and clear reports. One of its main differentiators is the use of AI to generate valuable insights, enabling engineering teams to quickly identify root causes of issues and performance trends without relying directly on a DBA. This provides greater autonomy for engineering, speeds up the investigation process, and allows the DBA team to operate in a more strategic and scalable manner, benefiting the entire organization.”
Database Observability will be available in Public Preview in the coming weeks – sign up to join the waitlist to be notified when it’s available.
Service Center: A Service-First View of System Health
For teams running complex, distributed systems, it’s often difficult to connect day-to-day operations with the services that matter most to the business. With recent updates to the Grafana Cloud Service Center, users have a unified, service-centric view that makes it easier to understand reliability, respond to incidents, and continuously improve.
New enhancements include:
- Service-defined indicators: Define your own service indicators, with all labeled/tagged resources automatically pulled into a single landing page.
- Clear performance summaries: View how critical indicators for each service have performed over a defined timeframe, making it easier to track service health at a glance.
- Faster troubleshooting: Jump directly from the landing page into pre-filtered product areas without needing to manually search and filter dashboards across Grafana products.
- Operational reviews for improvement: Run recurring Operational Reviews within the Service Center to identify trends, measure SLOs, and strengthen reliability over time.
By unifying dashboards and alerts into a single service view, Service Center helps teams quickly understand system health and work together more effectively.
Making OpenTelemetry Work at Enterprise Scale
Grafana Labs’ 2025 Observability Survey found that 71% of organizations use both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, with adoption growing year over year. While these open standards provide strong foundations, many teams struggle to scale them due to under-instrumentation, pipeline sprawl, and cost management challenges.
Grafana Labs is addressing these challenges with native OpenTelemetry and Prometheus support in Grafana Cloud, featuring:
- Grafana Beyla: An eBPF-based auto-instrumentation tool, enabling zero-code collection of key telemetry.
- Grafana Alloy: An optimized distribution of the OTel Collector with Prometheus pipelines, providing a production-grade, enterprise-ready collector.
- Fleet Management and Instrumentation Hub: Enterprise capabilities that help simplify rollout, remote pipeline management, and cost governance across massive estates. Join our waitlist for early access and updates for the new Instrumentation Hub.
“Our customers want the best of both worlds: the flexibility of open standards and the ability to find deep insights easily with Grafana Cloud,” said Myrle Krantz, Director of Engineering at Grafana Labs. “By packaging OpenTelemetry with production-grade tooling, we’re helping organizations accelerate adoption without sacrificing scale or control.”
Together, these updates bring observability into a new era: one where every engineer can see their systems clearly, respond quickly, and optimize costs without navigating complexity alone.
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About Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale, enabling organizations to see, understand, and act on all their disparate data so they can move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 25 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,400+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.
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