New Tempo release brings AI-assisted tracing; Kubernetes Monitoring adds fleet management and Helm Chart v2; Mimir 3.0 preview expands open observability at scale.

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, today announced the launch of Grafana Mimir 3.0, the latest evolution of its open-source, horizontally scalable metrics backend. Introduced at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2025, Mimir 3.0 marks an architectural milestone, delivering new levels of reliability, performance, and cost efficiency for Prometheus-compatible monitoring at enterprise scale.

Built on open source, open standards, and open ecosystems, Grafana Labs helps organizations innovate without lock-in and move fast without compromise. At KubeCon, the company also announced updates across its open-source ecosystem, including Grafana Tempo 2.9 with AI-assisted tracing, continued Kubernetes Monitoring enhancements, and deeper Prometheus and OpenTelemetry support to help teams simplify observability and gain more value from their data.

“From open source and open standards to open ecosystems and open minds – building in the open is core to our philosophy at Grafana Labs,” said Myrle Krantz, Senior Director of Engineering, Grafana Labs. “That’s why we’re continuing to invest in open source, like adding AI-assisted tracing in Tempo and making it easier to get the most out of OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. We’re continuously improving Kubernetes Monitoring. And with the new Mimir 3.0 release, we’re helping teams scale even more reliably, expanding what’s possible for open observability in 2026 and beyond.”

Grafana Mimir 3.0: Improved Reliability and Performance

Three years in development, Grafana Mimir 3.0 introduces a new decoupled architecture that separates the read and write paths for more reliable, large-scale metrics operations:

• Reliability: By decoupling reads and writes through an asynchronous Kafka-based ingest layer, cross-path dependencies are eliminated, keeping queries fast and stable even under heavy ingestion loads.
• Performance: The new Mimir Query Engine (MQE) streams query results instead of loading entire datasets into memory, improving execution speed and reducing memory usage by up to 92%.
• Cost efficiency: Early testing reports up to 15% lower resource usage while achieving higher throughput and consistency across large clusters.

Together, these innovations make Mimir 3.0 the most resilient, high-performing, and cost-efficient metrics backend for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry data – now available on Grafana Cloud and for self-managed users via open source.

Grafana Tempo 2.9: AI-Assisted Tracing and Faster Queries

The latest release of Grafana Tempo, the open source distributed tracing backend, introduces new capabilities to speed up trace analysis and bring AI into the observability workflow.

• MCP server support: An experimental Model Context Protocol (MCP) server allows AI assistants like Claude Code and Cursor to query distributed tracing data with TraceQL, enabling natural-language debugging and faster root cause analysis.
• TraceQL metrics sampling: New probabilistic query hints accelerate analysis in high-volume environments, returning approximate results faster without losing visibility.
• Multi-tenant and operational improvements: New metrics for query I/O, span timing, and usage tracking improve observability and performance visibility at scale.

Tempo 2.9 also deepens OpenTelemetry support by aligning with newer OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, reaffirming Grafana Labs’ commitment to open, composable observability.

Kubernetes Observability: Intelligent, Automated, and Built for Modern Workloads

Building on the success of Grafana Cloud Kubernetes Monitoring, Grafana Labs has introduced powerful new capabilities that simplify observability across even the most complex Kubernetes environments. This is especially timely as a recent survey by the CNCF found that 80% of respondents work for IT organizations that have deployed Kubernetes in a production environment.

Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud has evolved into a best-in-class, opinionated observability solution that doesn’t just visualize telemetry but interprets it, automates insights, and guides teams to action. New updates include:

• Grafana AI Assistant integration: Teams can now interact with Kubernetes Monitoring using Grafana Assistant (now generally available), an AI-powered agent built into Grafana Cloud that can read dashboards, drill into panels, and summarize results in real time. Using natural language, users can ask how a workload is behaving, what’s impacting performance, or where costs are trending.
• GPU monitoring: Available at both the Node and Cluster level, new GPU utilization panels help detect overheating, power drain, or underuse before they impact performance, ensuring AI workloads remain stable and efficient.
• Automated root cause analysis: Now integrated with the generally available Grafana Knowledge Graph, Kubernetes Monitoring gives you automatic RCA and Insight Rings.
• Expanded workload support: Kubernetes Monitoring now provides full visibility into CronJobs, Argo Rollouts, Bare Pods, Static Pods, Strimzi Pod Sets, and other nonstandard workloads, ensuring comprehensive coverage across diverse infrastructure types.
• Monitor cron jobs and other job types: Get full visibility into all cron and manual jobs across clusters. Instantly see status, distribution, and missed runs to ensure automation reliability and quick issue detection.
• CPU and memory panels: New CPU and Memory tabs provide clear, layered views of compute usage – from cluster to container – with efficiency graphs and CPU distribution analysis that help optimize capacity, cost, and performance.
• Cloud provider nodes: One-click correlation between AWS EC2 instances and Kubernetes workloads enables unified troubleshooting across cloud and container layers, reducing context-switching and mean time to resolution. And for teams on AWS, CloudWatch metric streams in Grafana Cloud can cut metric pipeline costs, including storage and agent infrastructure, by up to 10x while delivering near-real-time metrics.

Together, these updates make Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud an intelligent, automated, and AI-capable solution for today’s dynamic, large-scale environments.

At the recent ObservabilityCON event in London, Backbase systems engineer Andrei Drumov said of Kubernetes Monitoring, “We are collecting the telemetry signals using Grafana Alloy and we are using the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm charts developed and maintained by Grafana to manage the Grafana Alloy deployments. We chose this path because of its simplicity, flexibility, and modularity. It's relatively easy to manage. It allows us the flexibility to extend the configurations in case we need custom integrations, and it also allows us to conditionally enable or disable certain features based on certain customer needs, because some customers may need application availability, some other customers may need continuous profiling, some customers may need both. And with Kubernetes Monitoring Helm charts, it's really easy to juggle.”

Open Source Ecosystem Highlights

According to Grafana Labs’ 2025 Observability Survey, open standards like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry continue to gain momentum across the industry. The survey found that 71% of organizations use both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, with more than half increasing their investments in OpenTelemetry for the second year in a row. While 67% of organizations use Prometheus in production in some capacity, OpenTelemetry is on a strong growth trajectory, with 38% of respondents investigating adoption and only 6% reporting no plans to use it at all. The findings also show that vendor neutrality and flexibility remain the most cited requirements for observability tools, directly aligning with Grafana Labs’ open, composable approach.

Building on these trends, Grafana Labs continues to invest in open standards and community-led innovation across its ecosystem:

• Beyla donation complete: Earlier in 2025, Grafana Labs donated Grafana Beyla, its eBPF-based, zero-code auto-instrumentation agent, to OpenTelemetry. Renamed OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation, the project just marked its first official release under the OpenTelemetry umbrella. The donation reinforces Grafana Labs’ long-standing commitment to advancing open, vendor-neutral observability.
• Grafana Alloy: Grafana Labs’ distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, Grafana Alloy is now the default data pipeline layer across Grafana Cloud and open source deployments. Alloy unifies metrics, logs, and traces collection while supporting both Prometheus and OpenTelemetry pipelines.
• Prometheus 3.0 and OpenTelemetry interoperability: Grafana engineers contributed to the introduction of profiling signal support, new semantic conventions, and Prometheus 3.0 compatibility, strengthening cross-project interoperability.

See Grafana Labs at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025

Visit Grafana Labs booth #444 for live demos and hear more about Grafana Labs’ products and open source contributions during the following sessions featuring Grafana Labs engineers:

• Monday, November 10 at 10:40 am EST: Telemetry That Matches Your Model, Verified Live – Liudmila Molkova, Staff Developer Advocate, Grafana Labs
• Tuesday, November 11 at 5:45 pm EST: Straight Into the Deep End! Learning Kubernetes and Cloud Native From Scratch in Late 2024 – Éamon Ryan, Senior Principal Field Engineer, Grafana Labs and Ayah Elshaikh, Senior Field Engineer, Grafana Labs
• Wednesday, November 12 at 2:15 pm EST: UX Research Report: Prometheus and OTel’s Resource Attributes – Amy Super, Principal Product Designer, Grafana Labs
• Wednesday, November 12 at 4:00 pm EST: Debugging your cluster when it’s on fire – Nikola Grcevski, Principal Software Engineer, Grafana Labs
• Wednesday, November 12 at 5:30 pm EST: Observing Dark Matter with OpenTelemetry – Mario Macías, Staff Software Engineer, Grafana Labs
• Thursday, November 13 at 1:45 pm EST: Prometheus Intro, Deep Dive, and Open Q+A – Owen Williams, Principal Software Engineer, Grafana Labs

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.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251105571677/en/