What’s new in Grafana Cloud

We’ll be improving the scalability, reliability, and functionality of 6 synthetic monitoring probe locations by moving them to AWS: Frankfurt, Singapore, London, Mumbai, Sydney, and Tokyo. This change will bring static IPv4 addresses and IPv6 CIDR ranges for more reliable allow-listing, as well as make k6-powered scripted checks available in these locations. The locations will be upgraded to a new public probe architecture with improved reliability. These 6 locations will be migrated to AWS in October 2024.

We’ve streamlined the onboarding process for OnCall, making it quicker and easier for new users to get started. Now, new users can access OnCall immediately without waiting for an admin to log in. OnCall initialization has been moved to the backend, reducing setup time and minimizing potential errors. Additionally, user synchronization between Grafana and OnCall is significantly faster, so newly created users can start using OnCall within minutes—without any delays or extra steps.

Webhooks are a useful and flexible way to interact with third-party services. While OnCall has supported advanced webhook integrations for some time, they were previously limited to automatic triggers, such as event-based triggers (e.g., alert group status changes) or escalation chain steps. Now, you can manually trigger webhooks within the context of an alert group. This new feature enables you to push alert group data to external systems on demand, giving you greater flexibility and control over your integrations.

We’ve made a helpful update to the Binary operation mode of the Add field from calculation transformation! When you set up a binary operation calculation, there’s a new All number fields option available to select. Use this to apply a mathematical operator to multiple number fields simultaneously. This feature is particularly useful when you’re scaling or offsetting data containing multiple, dynamically named fields, allowing the transformation to be applied when dealing with unknown field names.

Grafana admins struggle to effectively communicate important updates and maintenance information to their users through traditional channels like email and Slack. Customers have requested a feature to display customizable banners within the Grafana interface to ensure critical information is visible and timely. The announcement banner feature directly addresses the communication challenges faced by Grafana admins by allowing them to display critical information prominently within the Grafana interface. This ensures that all users are immediately informed of important updates, maintenance schedules, compliance info, or other crucial messages, reducing the likelihood of missed communications and enhancing overall user awareness and engagement.

Introducing the new mobile app home screen The new home screen is a centralized hub that gives you an at-a-glance overview of everything you need as soon as you open the app. Whether you’re checking your on-call schedule, monitoring active incidents, or managing alert groups, everything is now front and center, making the app more streamlined and efficient for your daily use. With the new home screen you can:

You can now create subfolders in folders where you have Edit or Admin rights without needing any additional permissions. This enables users and teams to fully manage their folder and dashboard hierarchy, and allows you to keep your instance secure by granting users the minimum necessary set of permissions.

We’ve added legend support to bar gauge visualizations. You can customize legends by navigating to the Legend section in panel options. By default, the legend is disabled. To better support the legend integration, we’ve added the ability to hide names in each bar gauge. To do that, in the Name placement option, choose Hidden.

You can now choose Azure AKS as a platform when using the easy deploy method with the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart. This sets the required annotations in the Helm chart config file. The metrics status tab includes statuses for recording rules and the KSM job label. Documentation links have been added to the Overview, Cost, Alerts, and Configuration pages.

Public Preview in Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise Migrating from OSS or Enterprise Grafana to Grafana Cloud has traditionally been complex, requiring technical knowledge of Grafana’s HTTP API and time-consuming manual processes. The new Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant changes this by providing a user-friendly interface that automates the migration of your resources. No coding required, it securely handles the transfer in just a few easy steps. This intuitive UI offers real-time updates on your migration status, making your migration journey faster, more efficient, and less error-prone.

When setting up Grafana with Azure AD using the SAML protocol, the Azure AD Graph API sometimes returns a follow-up Graph API call rather than the information itself. This is the case for users who belong to more than 150 groups when using SAML. With Grafana 11.2, we offer a mechanism for setting up an application as a Service Account in Azure AD and retrieving information from Graph API.

We’ve updated canvas visualizations so that now you can add actions to canvas elements. The Selected element configuration now includes a Data links and actions section where you can add actions to elements. Each action can be configured to call an API endpoint. Actions can also be configured to be triggered with a single click. To enable this functionality, select Action under the one One-click section in the Selected element data links and actions option.

As Grafana keeps growing, we have had feedback that it can be hard to find the pages you are looking for in the navigation. That is why we have added a new section to the navigation called ‘Bookmarks’, so you can easily access all of your favourite pages at the top of the navigation. This feature is being rolled out across Grafana Cloud now. To use Bookmarks in self-managed Grafana, turn on the pinNavItems feature toggle in Grafana v11.

The newly enhanced Grafana IRM Slack integration incorporates your Slack workspace directly into your incident response workflow, allowing your team focus on alert resolution with less friction. Previously, you needed to install and configure separate Slack integrations for OnCall and Incident. With this update, we’ve unified and rebranded the OnCall Slack app as the Grafana IRM Slack app, now equipped with incident management features. As part of this change, the legacy Incident Slack integration is being deprecated.

We’ve improved the inspect value experience in table visualizations with the addition of tabs in the Inspect value drawer: Plain text and Code editor. When the Cell inspect value switch is toggled on, clicking the inspect icon in a cell opens the drawer. Grafana attempts to automatically detect the type of data in the cell and opens the drawer with the associated tab showing. However, you can switch back and forth between tabs.