What’s new in Grafana Cloud

When you’re browsing Grafana - for example, exploring the dashboard and metrics related to an alert - it’s easy to end up far from where you started and hard get back to where you came from. The ‘Return to previous’ button is an easy way to go back to the previous context, like the alert rule that kicked off your exploration. This first release works for Alerts, and we plan to expand to other apps and features in Grafana in future releases to make it easier to navigate around.

Return to Previous is rolling out across Grafana Cloud now. To try Return to Previous in self-managed Grafana, turn on the returnToPrevious feature toggle in Grafana v10.4 or newer.

Copying and pasting time range in the time range picker is now available. For example, you can copy a time range in Explore and paste it into Dashboards and vice versa. You can also copy and paste a time range using the new keyboard shortcuts t+c and t+v, respectively.

The Opsgenie contact point has been extended to allow users to optionally fill out responder information for their integration. Responders tell Opsgenie who an alert should notify according to their escalation policies and routing rules.

InfluxDB introduced a new version, 3.0, in April. With this new version, InfluxDB has put Flux in maintenance mode. But with the new version we have a new querying language, Native SQL. With v10.3.0, Grafana has built-in support for SQL query language in InfluxDB.

All you need to do is set up your InfluxDB Cloud Account and create your InfluxDB data source on Grafana with the query language “SQL” selected.

New in Explore, more options for sharing your query results! The time picker in Grafana has always had two categories - relative (for example, now to 2 hours ago) and absolute (8am to 10am). Explore has allowed people to copy links and create short links with exactly what their time picker had set, but now additionally you have the option to get a link or create a short link with the time range made absolute, even if you are viewing relative time. This means whoever looks at your link will see exactly the data you are seeing, no matter when they open the link. This is available as a dropdown next to the existing shortlink button in Explore.

We’ve improved the reporting experience with options to make all of your table data accessible in PDFs. Previously, if your dashboard included large table visualizations, you couldn’t see all of the table data in your PDF report. Unlike in Grafana, you couldn’t scroll in the PDF table visualization or click on the page numbers. With this new feature, you now have the option to see all the data directly in your PDF without losing your dashboard layout.

We’ve added two format options to the report creation form:

• Include table data as PDF appendix - Adds an appendix to your dashboard PDF.
• Attach a separate PDF of table data - Generates a separate PDF file for your table panel data.

You can add an expiration date when you create a Grafana Access Policy token during the easy configuration process of Kubernetes Monitoring. The permission scope of the token also displays as you configure.

Release v1.7.0

Sumo Logic enterprise data source plugin for Grafana lets users query metrics and logs from their Sumo Logic instance.

Plugin is already live in v 1.0

We’ve added two new features to transformations in Grafana, to help you make sense of your data.

Moving average

We’ve revamped the Transformations user interface to make it cleaner, more user-friendly, and overall better for visualizing, selecting, and comprehending transformation options for your data.

Improved UI

Introducing query caching for async queries in the Athena and Redshift data source plugins. We previously introduced async queries for the Athena and Redshift plugins, and this feature adds support for caching those queries. To use this, you must have query caching enabled for the Athena or Redshift data source you wish to cache. This feature was previously available behind a feature toggle and is now generally available and enabled by default.

To reduce the noise of flapping alerts, you can set a recovery threshold different to the alert threshold.

Flapping alerts occur when a metric hovers around the alert threshold condition and may lead to frequent state changes, resulting in too many notifications being generated.

Introducing several improvements to the Loki data source.

Line filter “or” syntax

Loki’s line filter syntax is great to find specific substrings of your log lines. If users want to find multiple different substrings it was cumbersome to use the regex =~ operator. With this change it is possible to chain multiple strings with the existing filter operators.

You can now apply data transformations to annotation data. For example, you can now configure how exemplar data is displayed in tooltips.

Canvas visualizations now support panning and zooming. This allows you to both create and navigate more complex designs.

To enable this feature, you must first enable the canvasPanelPanZoom feature toggle.