What’s new in Grafana Cloud

The Grafana Assume Role authentication provider lets Grafana Cloud users of the CloudWatch data source authenticate with AWS without having to create and maintain long term AWS Users. Using the new assume role authentication method, you no longer have to rotate access and secret keys in your CloudWatch data source. Instead, Grafana Cloud users can create an identity access and management (IAM) role that has a trust relationship with Grafana’s AWS account; Grafana’s AWS account will then use AWS Secure Token Service (STS) to create temporary credentials to access the user’s AWS data.

To learn more, refer to the CloudWatch authentication documentation.

You can now use generative AI to assist you in your Grafana dashboards. So far generative AI can help you with the following tasks:

• Generate panel and dashboard titles and descriptions - You can now generate a title and description for your panel or dashboard based on the data you’ve added to it. This is useful when you want to quickly visualize your data and don’t want to spend time coming up with a title or description.
• Generate dashboard save changes summary - You can now generate a summary of the changes you’ve made to a dashboard when you save it. This is great for effortlessly tracking the history of a dashboard.

To enable these features, you must first enable the dashgpt feature toggle. Then install and configure Grafana’s LLM app plugin. For more information, refer to the Grafana LLM app plugin documentation.

You can now zoom in on the y-axis of your time series and candlestick visualizations. This is useful when you want to focus on a specific range of values. To zoom in on the y-axis on supported visualizations, hold the Shift key while clicking and dragging; double-click to reset the zoom.

With Grafana v9.3, we introduced a feature toggle called accessTokenExpirationCheck. It improves the security of Grafana by checking the expiration of the access token and automatically refreshing the expired access token when a user is logged in using one of the OAuth providers.

With the current release, we’ve introduced a new configuration option for each OAuth provider called use_refresh_token that allows you to configure whether the particular OAuth integration should use refresh tokens to automatically refresh access tokens when they expire. In addition, to further improve security and provide secure defaults, use_refresh_token is enabled by default for providers that support either refreshing tokens automatically or client-controlled fetching of refresh tokens. It’s enabled by default for the following OAuth providers: AzureAD, GitLab, Google.

Create alerts from dashboard panels. You can reuse the panel queries and create alerts based on them.

Introducing Content Outline in Grafana Explore. We recognized the challenges of complex mixed queries, as well as, lengthy logs and traces results, leading to time-consuming navigation and the loss of context. Content outline is our first step towards seamless navigation from log lines to traces and back to queries ensuring quicker searches while preserving context. Experience efficient, contextual investigations with this update in Grafana Explore. To learn more, refer to the Content outline documentation, as well as the following video demo.

We’re excited to introduce the “No basic role,” a new basic role with no permissions. A basic role in Grafana dictates the set of actions a user or entity can perform, known as permissions. This new role is especially beneficial if you’re aiming for tailored, customized RBAC permissions for your service accounts or users. You can set this as a basic role through the API or UI.

Previously, permissions were granted based on predefined sets of capabilities. Now, with the “No basic role,” you have the flexibility to be even more granular.

Public dashboards allow you to share your visualizations and insights to a broader audience without the requirement of a login. You can effortlessly use our current sharing model and create a public dashboard URL to share with anyone using the generated public URL link. To learn more, refer to the Public dashboards documentation, as well as the following video demo:

Creating correlations has just become easier. Try out our new correlations editor in Explore by selecting the + Add > Add correlation option from the top bar or from the command palette. The editor shows all possible places where you can place data links and guides you through building and testing target queries. For more information, refer to the documentation.

The TraceQL query editor has been improved to facilitate the creation of TraceQL queries. In particular, it now features improved autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and error reporting.

To provide quicker identification and troubleshooting, the home page contains a snapshot of issues that reach the following thresholds:

• Pods that have been in a non-running state for more than 15 minutes
• Nodes with CPU usage above 90% for more than five minutes
• Nodes using more than 90% of memory for more than five minutes
• Persistent Volumes with capacity above 90%
• Node disks with capacity above 90%

(Release 1.3.1)

With recorded queries, a single recorded query can now record multiple metrics.

The SAP HANA® data source now supports tenant databases connections by using the database name and/or instance number. For more information, refer to SAP HANA® configuration.

You can now use the Grafana Cloud Traces integration with Grafana Cloud k6 to quickly debug failed performance tests and proactively improve application reliability.

Distributed tracing in Grafana Cloud k6 only requires two things:

• An application instrumented for tracing with Grafana Cloud Traces.
• Adding a few lines of code to your existing k6 scripts.

The new browse dashboards interface features a more compact design, making it easier to navigate, search for, and manage for your folders and dashboards. The new interface also has many performance improvements, especially for instances with a large number of folders and dashboards.

To make using folders easier and more consistent, there is no longer a special General folder. Dashboards without a folder, or dashboards previously in General, are now shown at the root level.