# Synthetic monitoring, service maps, and host health heatmaps

> Proactive uptime monitoring, interactive service topology, and a visual host health overview — plus new dashboard widgets, trace remapping, and keyboard shortcuts.

Source: https://last9.io/changelog/changelog-january-2026/

### Synthetic Monitoring

Proactive uptime monitoring is here. Create checks that run continuously from multiple regions to catch issues before your users do. Synthetic monitoring supports HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, DNS, and ICMP checks with custom assertions for response validation and timing thresholds.

- HTTP/HTTPS checks with custom headers, authentication, and response assertions
- TCP checks for verifying port connectivity to databases, caches, and internal services
- DNS checks to validate resolution and record values
- ICMP checks for traditional ping-based network monitoring- Multi-region execution across geographic locations
- Custom assertions on response codes, body content, headers, and timing thresholds

[Docs: Synthetic Monitoring](https://last9.io/blog/what-is-synthetic-monitoring/)

### Discover Service Map

An interactive topology map automatically built from your trace data shows how your services communicate. See request flows, latency and error indicators between services, and identify bottlenecks — all without any manual configuration.

- Auto-discovered topology built from trace data with no manual setup- Request flow visualization showing traffic movement between services- Latency and error rate indicators on connections to identify bottlenecks
- Click any service node to see its dependencies and drill into detailed metrics
- Focus on a service to highlight upstream and downstream connections
- Double-click a node to navigate directly to its Discover Services page

### Host Health Heatmap

Discover Hosts now includes a visual heatmap that shows the health of all your hosts at a glance. Instead of scrolling through tables, see color-coded health indicators across your entire fleet and drill down into any host with a single click.

- Color-coded health indicators — green for healthy, yellow for warning, red for critical
- Search and filter by host name, tag, or status- Group by any attribute such as environment, region, team, or custom tags
- Click any cell to drill down into detailed host metrics
- Toggle between heatmap and list views

[Docs: Host Health Heatmap](https://last9.io/docs/discover-hosts/)

### Improvements

- **Discover**
  - Per-process metrics on host detail pages with CPU, memory, and resource usage by individual process
  - RUM session filtering by page views and user actions in Applications
  - Kubernetes pod views include CPU and memory trend charts
- **Dashboards**
  - New heatmap, bar chart, and status history widgets with configurable thresholds and saved sort preferences
  - Legend placement configurable with left, right, or bottom positioning for line and donut charts
- **Logs**
  - All JSON attributes indexed by default with full nested field search and "Filter By" on every field
  - Related logs from traces now support filtering and time range changes
- **AI Assistant**: New chat interface with improved streaming and semantic search-based context engineering
- **Control Plane**: Trace attribute remapping with sequenced rules applied at ingestion time to normalize naming across services
- **Settings**: Removed the 5-user limit on free plan accounts
- **Platform**: Hosted MCP server for connecting AI tools to observability data
- **General**
  - Keyboard shortcuts throughout the app — \`?\` for help, \`Cmd/Ctrl+K\` for command palette, \`j\`/\`k\` for vim-style navigation, \`1\`/\`2\`/\`3\` to switch query modes, and toggle controls like \`t f\` for filters and \`t w\` for line wrap. [View all shortcuts](https://last9.io/docs/keyboard-shortcuts/).
  - Dark mode with theme switching from the command palette
  - Command palette dynamically fetches dashboards, supports new-tab links, and triggers from the navbar

### Fixes

- **Discover**: RUM backend correlation with DataDog was not working with forceOverwrite enabled
- **Dashboards**
  - Label filters were only applying to one metric instead of all metrics in a chart
  - Panel edit preview was not shown until switching widget types
- **Logs**
  - Related logs view was ignoring the trace ID filter and showing all logs
  - JSON tree view was not rendering arrays correctly
  - Volume chart was showing incorrect data in certain conditions
  - CSV exports were not including the full timestamp with year
- **Control Plane**: Otel collector config had a regex typo causing CrashLoopBackOff in collector pods
- **Settings**: Token generation modal was not functional in dark mode
- **General**: Left sidebar was defaulting to collapsed for first-time users