Managing multi-cloud environments often means juggling different monitoring tools for each provider, leading to increased complexity and operational overhead. To solve for that, we’re excited to introduce Cloud Provider Observability — an application for monitoring AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud services, all in Grafana Cloud.

What happens when a police officer turns off his camera? Because this will happen. The camera will “malfunction” or be “accidently” obscured.

Will police need warrants to access the camera data? With every officer equipped with a camera the surveillance state can be everywhere. These videos, originally designed to keep officers in check, will inevitably turn into an investigative tool to be used against the public.

First, body cameras are expensive. Montreal's public safety committee estimated that outfitting the city’s cops with cameras would cost $17.4 million over five years with around $20 million annually in associated costs. The Toronto Police Services Board approved the purchase of 2,350 body cameras at a cost of more than $34 million over five years.

And it is unclear that body cameras will even help in reducing the instances of police misconduct. A year-long trial in Montreal found that body cameras had little impact on police interventions; and a randomized controlled trial involving 2,224 Metropolitan Police Department officers in Washington, DC showed that body cameras had a very small and statistically insignificant effect on police use of force and civilian complaints.

In the latest episode of "Grafana's Big Tent" podcast, Grafana Labs team members recap the highlights of the Grafana 11 release, and offer an early...

Lower costs, reduced maintenance, centralized tools — observability experts talk about why Grafana Cloud is their hosted platform of choice.

Can a victim of police abuse access the video? Will it be stored offsite or at the police station? Will the data be encrypted? How long will it be stored for?

Being part of prometheus-community will give the Amazon CloudWatch exporter increased visibility and help ensure its long-term sustainability.

Cloud Provider Observability in Grafana Cloud simplifies monitoring multi-cloud environments and provides more comprehensive insights across your services. With its unified monitoring capabilities, easy setup, automatic service detection, and dedicated log views, this solution empowers your team to manage complex, multi-cloud environments with confidence and efficiency.

We’ll demo how to get started using the LGTM Stack: Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics.

Desmond Cole told me on my podcast that body cameras are a liberal panacea for people who are not really interested in decreasing the police’s power.

We’re currently working towards feature parity with our AWS offerings, and will soon include the same serverless and agentless options that our AWS customers appreciate for GCP and Azure.

None of these questions have been answered. But we seem to be so eager to hand over millions of dollars to large pro-police corporations like Axon, one of the largest makers of body cameras and “smart weapons.”

For Google Cloud and Azure users, the Cloud Provider Observability app leverages Grafana Alloy — our open source OpenTelemetry collector with built-in Prometheus pipelines and support for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles — providing actionable insights for managing metrics and logs.

Police don’t want the system to change. They don’t want their budgets cut. They don’t want to lose power. They don’t want stricter accountability. They don’t want more training about rights and racism. They don’t want to be defunded. They want things to stay the same.

Getting started with Cloud Provider Observability is quick and straightforward. The app provides comprehensive scraping instructions, enabling you to start ingesting cloud provider telemetry without any extra work. Whether you’re dealing with AWS’s Elastic Load Balancing, Azure SQL Databases, or Google Cloud Storage, the app automatically configures and scales to meet your needs, so you can focus on more critical tasks.

The secret the police don’t want us to know is that we are the chickens and they are the foxes. And for a brief moment the foxes convinced me that it was a good idea to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up the status quo, instead of fixing a broken system from the ground up.

There is also little in the way of policies and procedures to regulate how the data captured by police body cameras will be stored and used. If the whole reason for cameras in the first place is because of a lack of trust in law enforcement, are we content to hand them our data?

And who will appear on video most often? The same overpoliced communities who already experience disproportionate levels of police violence and abuse. Proponents of videos seem content to give up the privacy and rights of others rather than themselves.

The seductive argument is that body cameras are needed to police the police. I get it; there is no question that police officers violate rights. Despite denials by the boys in blue, systemic racism is real. And we have seen examples of police abuse exposed in court, on social media, and in the lived experiences of racialized people.

Shortly after I wrote that it was time we turned the cameras of the surveillance state toward the police — not for their protection but for ours — I spoke with Desmond Cole about some of the common misconceptions about police accountability measures. And over the past four years, after talking to people who are the most affected by police violence and abuse, I changed my mind about police body cameras.

Cloud Provider Observability also offers detailed log views designed to make troubleshooting more intuitive and effective. Logs are displayed in a clear, actionable format that helps reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), which is crucial in multi-cloud environments where issues can span across different providers.

When you connect to any of these cloud providers, Grafana Cloud immediately detects all supported services. This feature eliminates the need for manual effort, saving you time and ensuring your services are monitored from the moment they are deployed.

You might remember when Toronto police chief Mark Saunders pushed for body cameras: “I have been pushing hard. I want this done now. The people are talking, they want this. I want this.”

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!

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The Cloud Provider Observability application (which is in public preview) is an extension of our AWS Observability app, offering expanded support for multi-cloud environments. You can now unify multi-cloud monitoring efforts with a single, out-of-the-box solution that integrates seamlessly with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.