Grafana Cloud updates: tools to streamline performance testing, a new Adaptive Logs feature, and more

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics).

In case you missed them, here’s our monthly round-up (the first of 2025!) of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

And if you’re not a Grafana Cloud user yet, sign up for an account today! You can try any of these features (and more) for free with our generous Cloud Free plan.

Grafana Cloud k6 updates

This month, we’re sharing a couple of updates to Grafana Cloud k6, including a new API and a recommendations tool that makes it easier than ever for you to ramp up with the fully managed performance testing platform.

Tailored recommendations to get started

Grafana Cloud k6 includes a range of features to help you maximize the value of performance testing. That said, for those new to the platform, we realize that a little help getting started can go a long way.

That’s why we’re excited to roll out the Recommendations tab in the Test run view of Grafana Cloud k6. This intelligent tool analyzes telemetry data, including metrics, logs, and traces, to provide best practices tailored to you and your team. For example, it might suggest:

• Using other Grafana Cloud products for your use case, such as Synthetic Monitoring.
• Exploring other Grafana Cloud k6 features, such as Private Load Zones.
• Correlating results with Grafana Cloud Traces.

These suggestions can help you optimize testing and monitoring workflows, expand your test coverage, and find root causes faster.

New HTTP API is generally available

The new Grafana Cloud k6 API, now generally available, includes endpoints that make it easier for teams to integrate k6 with their CI/CD processes. For example, you can:

• Start and stop test runs
• Start a test run with a test ID
• Upload and download scripts
• Manage project limits
• Save and unsave test results
• Get cost estimates and execution cost for test runs
• Inspect the test run lifecycle

This new API also includes an OpenAPI specification to use as a reference or starting point to import into an API testing tool and start playing with the new endpoints.

While you can continue using the previous version of the Grafana Cloud k6 API, we recommend you migrate to the new API version for the endpoints that are available, such as the Projects and Test runs endpoints.

For more details, please refer to the Grafana Cloud k6 API docs.

Data visualization: new options to customize and share panel images

Over the past month, we’ve made a few changes that offer more flexibility when sharing panel images with teammates.

For example, when you share a panel link, there’s now a Panel preview section where you can:

• Customize a panel image by adjusting its width, height, and scale
• See a preview of the panel image
• Download and share the image without a URL

In addition, we’ve updated the sharing process itself. Previously, you clicked a button to render the panel image, and then had to send that image URL in order to share. Now, you click a button to generate the image, download it, and send it directly to other users.

To learn more, please check out our technical docs.

Machine learning updates: a new UI for metric forecasting

This month, we’re rolling out a more dynamic UI to help with metrics forecasting.

Grafana Machine Learning now runs a low-resolution training right in your browser, allowing you to see the forecast and confidence bounds immediately, tune your forecast parameters as needed, and set up alerting without waiting for the full training to run (or needing deep expertise in forecasting algorithms).

This means, if you’ve found forecasts challenging to set up in the past, now is a great time to give them another try. With one click, your forecast can be used as an adaptive alert.

The new forecasting UI replaces the old UI, and is generally available for everyone in Grafana Cloud. All existing forecasts will continue to function as before, but you’ll get the interactive UI when you need to edit them.

Please check out our technical docs to learn more.

Adaptive Logs adds per-service recommendation drops

Adaptive Logs is a feature in Grafna Cloud that uses AI/ML techniques to analyze observability data at scale and identify commonly ingested log patterns. From there, it creates a set of customized recommendations for dropping unused telemetry. The end result? You lower your observability costs by reducing the volume of unnecessary logs and improve your log management experience by focusing on what’s truly valuable.

Starting this month, you can now apply Adaptive Logs recommendations on a per-service basis.

This feature is useful if multiple services are producing logs with identical patterns, and you want to treat logs from those services differently. It also makes it easier to apply recommendations per service, or per team, in bulk.

To learn more about this feature, which is available now in public preview, please visit our technical docs. And if you’re interested in learning more about Adaptive Telemetry features in Grafana Cloud, in general, this blog post and the video below are a great place to start.

Grafana SLO now supports Grafana-managed alert rules

Grafana-managed alert rules can query data from multiple data sources in a single alert rule, making them our most flexible alert rule type. And now, they’re supported in Grafana SLO, an application that makes it easy to create, manage, and scale service level objectives, SLO dashboards, and error budget alerts in Grafana Cloud.

Grafana-managed alert rules enable features such as alerting annotations on SLO dashboard panels, SLO alert state history, and images in SLO alert notifications.

Your alerting system can be managed via plugin preferences, and can be set to generate either data source-managed alert rules or Grafana-managed alert rules. Please check out our Grafana SLO documentation for more information.

Incident response and management updates

This month, we have updates to share related to both Grafana OnCall and Grafana Incident.

Service account token authentication in OnCall API

We’re excited to introduce service account token authentication for the OnCall API. With this change, you can now generate tokens to interact with the API so that they:

• Aren’t tied to any specific user
• Can be enabled or disabled as needed
• Can be set to optionally expire at a given time
• Can be scoped to a specific set of permissions for more granular control

In addition, this update allows us to extend the Terraform provider to support this authentication method in the OnCall client. This lets you configure and manage your Grafana stack, including OnCall resources, without having to create an OnCall-specific API token, which simplifies automation and enhances security.

You can learn more in our OnCall docs.

New labels in Grafana Incident

Sometimes, when you track incidents with a few simple tags, it’s a struggle to see the big picture. That’s why we’ve overhauled how you can organize and correlate incidents across your observability workflows.

The new labels feature in Grafana Incident replaces traditional tags with more flexible key-value pairs (for example, squad:incident or service_name:mimir). Beyond describing an incident, labels are now shared across multiple Grafana products, such as OnCall and SLO, tying them together for a more unified experience.

Here are some of the details:

• You can now easily annotate incidents with squad, service, or region, or define your own categories.
• With consistent labeling across Incident, OnCall, and SLO, you can query for incidents and alerts impacting the same services.
• By introducing a few restrictions on label naming, we ensure these labels can be passed into more systems without a hitch.

And don’t worry: we worked hard to make sure that your existing tags are migrated to labels and that existing public APIs continue to work.

Updates to data source plugins

Lastly, here’s a look at some recent updates to data sources plugins for Grafana Cloud:

• Elasticsearch data source plugin: This data source now supports Elasticsearch’s cross-cluster search feature. Previously, you needed to set up a separate data source in Grafana for each cluster, but now, you can query data across all clusters from a single Grafana data source, making it simpler and more convenient to query all of your Elasticsearch logs.
• Datadog data source plugin: This plugin now includes two additional features:
  • A Percentile Aggregation Function for distribution-type metrics.
  • A new Query Variable Syntax that supports all tags associated with a metric.

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!