GrafanaCON 2025: A guide to all the announcements from Grafana Labs

GrafanaCON 2025 is in full swing in Seattle, where members of our open source community have gathered to explore the latest updates to Grafana Labs’ OSS projects, share their inspiring use cases, and build lasting connections at our biggest community event yet.

Our annual conference, which focuses on all things Grafana and its extended open source ecosystem, kicked off on May 6 with a jam-packed agenda, featuring hands-on labs, 30+ live talks, and tons of one-of-a-kind activities that make this year’s event so unique (did somebody say a GrafanaCON Science Fair?!). 

Today, members of the Grafana Labs engineering and leadership team delivered an action-packed keynote, highlighting new OSS releases (Grafana 12 is here!), exciting updates related to Grafana Alloy and Beyla, and so much more. 

Continue reading for a roundup of the latest news out of GrafanaCON 2025.

Grafana 12 release

During the opening keynote of GrafanaCON 2025, we unveiled dozens of reasons to fall in love with Grafana 12—especially if your job is to keep teams, services, and, of course, a whole lot of beautiful Grafana dashboards organized.

This release brings powerful new tools to level up your observability workflows. You can dive into metrics, logs, and traces with the new Drilldown experience, manage alerts and recording rules natively, and sync dashboards to GitHub with Git Sync. Dashboards are faster and more flexible, with tabs, conditional logic, and blazing fast tables and geomaps thanks to dynamic dashboards. Don’t miss out on trying SQL Expressions to combine data from anywhere, and in Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise, you can instantly sync users and teams with SCIM. Bonus: Check out fresh color themes to make Grafana truly yours.

To learn more, check out our Grafana 12 release blog post and our observability as code blog post. And if you’d like early access to Git Sync, which is currently experimental for on-prem Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise users, and in private preview for Grafana Cloud users, please complete this interest form.

Grafana Beyla donation to OpenTelemetry 

About six months ago, we started on a journey to donate Grafana Beyla — the open source eBPF-based, zero-code instrumentation tool — to the OpenTelemetry project. Given the incredible support we’ve seen from our open source community along the way, GrafanaCON felt like the perfect place to share some exciting news: we’ve made the initial code drop of Beyla to OpenTelemetry, under the new project name OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation. 

We are working full time to meet the code acceptance criteria as outlined in the due diligence document, which will finalize the donation process. In the meantime, we want to sincerely thank everyone who’s contributed to Beyla since 2023 and to this donation. We wouldn’t be here without you, and we look forward to driving further innovation around zero-code instrumentation within the OpenTelemetry community.

To learn more about the donation, please check out the latest Beyla blog post.

Grafana Assistant: a context-aware, integrated LLM agent

Grafana Assistant is a tightly integrated, context-aware chat experience. Available in private preview in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant connects to your observability data through a flexible interface that lets you ask anything, go places, make changes, and even run investigations in natural language.

If you’re new to the Grafana ecosystem, you can ask Grafana Assistant about general concepts, and as you dig into more specifics, the agent will drill into actual observability data available via Grafana to provide highly contextual answers to your questions. And if you’re a more experienced user, you can run queries in natural language and even have data analyzed as part of a multi-step investigation. 

Grafana Assistant appears as a sidebar within the Grafana interface, receiving context about the current page and providing relevant suggestions. We will continue to improve and adjust the functionality, but for now we’re focused on giving you the best experience in these core areas: 

1. Learning, discovery, and support: Ask questions about your observability data and setup. The agent can also provide context-specific best practices based on our docs, blogs, and other website content — all without leaving the UI.
2. Research and investigations: Follow logical paths of inquiry for your incidents, with assistance based on real-world SRE experience. You can even run different mulit-step investigations at the same time.
3. Dashboarding: Create dashboards and edit panels in natural language.
4. Navigating Grafana: The agent understands the Grafana URLs and various apps, taking you places you need to go — from viewing metrics, logs, traces, and profiles to declaring incidents, creating SLOs, and setting up alerts.

You can learn more in in our Grafana Assistant announcement blog post. And if you want to help shape this exciting project, please sign up for our private preview today!

Grafana k6 1.0: developer-friendly performance testing

For nearly a decade, Grafana k6, the open source load and performance testing tool, has enabled teams to proactively improve application reliability. And today at GrafanaCON 2025, we’re celebrating the latest milestone for the k6 OSS project: its first major release.

Grafana k6 1.0 is officially here, delivering a number of features that will help empower the next generation of reliability testing. Some of the highlights include:

• Native TypeScript support: k6 1.0 delivers on one of the most common requests we’ve heard from our community: first-class TypeScript support. You can now write more robust, predictable, and easier-to-maintain tests with type safety and IDE autocomplete, and reuse your existing TypeScript code and types directly in your tests.
• Support for Semantic Versioning: k6 now follows Semantic Versioning, which means breaking changes only arrive in major releases (like 2.0) after explicit deprecation warnings.
• Revamped test insights: k6 1.0 includes a modernized end-of-test summary, including scenario-specific metrics, a hierarchical grouping of results, and improved check results. 

To learn more about the k6 1.0 release, please check out this blog post and the official k6 release notes on GitHub.

Queryless tracing with Grafana Traces Drilldown 

When there’s an error spike in your microservices environment, every second counts. That’s why, last year, we introduced Grafana Traces Drilldown (previously known as Explore Traces), an application that allows you to quickly investigate and visualize your tracing data through a simplified, queryless experience.

Today, we announced that Traces Drilldown is generally available, delivering a number of features to facilitate deep-dive trace analysis — no TraceQL queries required. Some of the latest updates include:

• Exemplars to help you quickly isolate issues: Exemplars highlight representative spans that capture critical events or anomalies, providing a quick visual summary of key operations within your trace data. They help you correlate and prioritize areas that warrant further investigation, without having to manually sift through extensive trace details.
• TraceQL streaming for faster feedback loops: With support for TraceQL query streaming, Traces Drilldown now delivers partial results as they come in, so you no longer have to wait for all results to finish processing before starting your analysis. 
• Performance and usability improvements: By addressing a range of bugs reported during the public preview phase, the GA release of Traces Drilldown delivers better overall performance and an improved UI that lets you easily jump forward, back-track, or branch off a workflow, based on what you see in the data.

To learn more about Traces Drilldown — which is part of our broader suite of Grafana Drilldown apps — please check out our documentation. 

Grafana Alloy updates 

We’re celebrating the one year anniversary of the launch of Grafana Alloy, our OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with built-in Prometheus pipelines and support for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles.

OpenTelemetry is quickly becoming an industry standard for telemetry collection, processing, and delivery, and we’re committed to making Alloy the best possible collector for telemetry data, whether you’re using it with Grafana Cloud or not.

In fact, we were thrilled to see Alloy was the most used OpenTelemetry Collector distribution after the upstream OpenTelemetry Collectors in a recent OpenTelemetry community DevEx survey!

A year after the initial launch, here are just some of the milestones we’ve hit:

• There are now more than 525,000 active Alloy instances in the world — and growing.
• We’ve added 18 additional OTel components to Alloy, bringing the total to more than 50. This included our first two community components that were implemented and maintained by community members: the Datadog Exporter and Splunk HEC exporter. 
• Within the /opentelemetry-collector and /opentelemetry-collector-contrib repos, Grafana Labs staff made more than 3,100 total contributions. This included our work on the upstream Datadog receiver, which we immediately made available in Alloy.

We’ve also added features to help you migrate from another OpenTelemetry distribution, debug your pipelines, and manage Alloy remotely in Grafana Cloud with Fleet Management. And we’re excited about what’s still to come, including further alignment with OpenTelemetry and improvements to debugging and Fleet Management.

For a closer look at what we’ve been working on and what’s still to come, check out the anniversary blog post.

Introducing the 2025 Golden Grot Awards winners

This year, we celebrated our third annual Golden Grot Awards, honoring the most creative and impactful Grafana dashboards from around the world — whether built for personal curiosity or mission-critical operations. 

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce the 2025 Golden Grot award winners for both our personal and professional categories. Cue the applause…

Tracking the International Space Station in real time: Ruben Fernandez

Ruben returns to the top of the Golden Grot podium with a new, awe-inspiring dashboard that tracks the International Space Station (ISS) in real time. His interactive Grafana dashboard features a live map of the ISS’ position, streaming NASA video feeds, and constantly updated data on altitude, speed, crew members, and docked spacecraft. Built using multiple APIs, Python, and Prometheus, the dashboard even shows when the ISS will be visible overhead — making it a favorite among skywatchers and space enthusiasts alike.

Monitoring wastewater with precision and clarity: Grant Chase

Grant’s dashboard powers real-time and historical insights for the Morro Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant. Designed for daily use by plant operators, it visualizes data from hundreds of sensors, motors, analyzers, and off-site lift stations — collected via PLCs and MQTT, and stored in InfluxDB. The dashboard dynamically adjusts data resolution for second-by-second accuracy, integrates lab data for compliance monitoring, and even includes embedded microscope video feeds. With a clean interface and intuitive navigation, it has become a mission-critical tool to ensure regulatory compliance and optimize plant performance.

Congratulations to both of our winners and to all of our finalists! 

For more information about all of the announcements, read our complete press release about GrafanaCON 2025.