What’s new in Grafana Cloud

Introduces a simplified version of the query and alert conditions step for creating Grafana-managed alert rules. The default options streamline rule creation with a cleaner header and a single query and condition. For more complex rules, switch to advanced options to add multiple queries and expressions.

This feature is rolling out to Grafana Cloud over the next couple of weeks.

We’re excited to announce that k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are now in private preview.

With k6 browser checks, you can control a headless Chrome browser using a k6 script. Powered by the k6 browser module, browser checks collect frontend Web Vitals metrics, capture custom performance metrics, and simulate user actions like clicking buttons or filling forms. Any scripts you create are also portable between Synthetic Monitoring and Grafana Cloud k6, as they are backed by the same engine, allowing you to reuse your monitoring scripts for performance testing and vice versa.

Introducing a redesigned sharing experience in Dashboards!

Previously, the way you shared dashboards could be confusing, with various options like Link, Snapshot, Export, PDF, Report, and Public Dashboard all in one dialog box. This approach didn’t take into consideration one’s specific sharing needs, leading to a suboptimal user experience.

We’ve renamed the Public dashboards feature, Shared dashboards. This renaming is part of our overall redesign of dashboard sharing and aims to better align externally shared dashboards with other dashboard sharing options.

The feature still functions the same way, but the configuration options that were previously part of public dashboards are now found in the Share externally option in the Share drop-down list.

The OpenID Connect Discovery URL is available in the Generic OAuth form. The info extracted from this URL will be used to populate the Auth URL, Token URL and API URL fields.

You can generate a new certificate and private key for SAML directly from the UI form. Click on the Generate key and certificate button from the Sign requests tab in the SAML form and then fill in the information you want to be embedded in your generated certificate.

Explore Logs offers a queryless experience for easily surfacing insights from logs stored in Grafana Loki, Grafana Cloud Logs, and Grafana Enterprise Logs.

You can spot troublesome services without running a single query, and quickly add filters with point-and-click interactions. Explore Logs generates visualizations of log volumes to let you easily detect anomalies or related changes across labels and over time. Patterns help you identify sources of signal or filter our sources of noise in your log line content, further accelerating your troubleshooting process.

Explore Metrics, generally available in Grafana OSS, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Cloud, offers a queryless experience to visualize time series data stored in Prometheus or any Prometheus-compatible time-series database.

Users can search and select a metric name and immediately see the optimal visualization type, whether the metric is a gauge, counter, or histogram. They can also review your selected metric broken down by each of its labels, which makes it easy to spot anomalies by namespace, cluster, or any other attribute. Additionally, they can see related metrics based on your selected metrics for a more comprehensive understanding of their environment.

Explore Profiles offers a queryless experience for easily surfacing insights from profiles stored in Grafana Pyroscope and Grafana Cloud Profiles.

Profiling data helps developers identify which parts of a program consume the most resources, such as CPU time, memory, or I/O operations. Profiling, as a signal, lets you either proactively or reactively address performance issues in multiple areas areas.

Explore Traces offers a queryless experience for easily surfacing insights from traces stored in Grafana Tempo, Grafana Cloud Traces, and Grafana Enterprise Traces.

Explore Traces helps you make sense of your tracing data so you can automatically visualize insights from your Tempo traces data. The app helps you understand errors and latency issues within complex distributed systems.

Asserts now supports root cause analysis bi-directional navigation between Asserts and Grafana Application Observability and Kubernetes Monitoring. When you are in Application Observability or Kubernetes Monitoring, you can seamlessly explore Assertions in Asserts without losing context. When in Asserts, you can easily navigate to Application Observability or Kubernetes Monitoring.

Grafana Cloud Asserts infrastructure solution dashboards

Asserts now automatically surfaces KPI dashboards for popular infrastructure components. If you’ve installed any of the following Grafana Cloud integrations, these dashboards automatically appear in Asserts.

• MongoDB
• Jenkins
• Apache Tomcat
• Windows
• Docker
• MySQL
• SNMP
• PostgreSQL
• Clickhouse
• Caddy

To help make it easier for administrators to assess and interact with Grafana plugins, we are reworking the plugin details page to highlight important metadata, such as when the plugin was last updated.

We intend to further extend this new layout with consistent links for all plugins, to complement the custom links which can currently be optionally configured. This improved consistency will enable simpler interaction with a plugin’s developer - whether that is Grafana Labs, our commercial partners, or our community. These links will include actions such as raising feature requests or bug reports, as well as allowing our community developers to indicate available support and sponsorship options for those that depend on their work.

The private key and certificate fields are no longer mandatory in the SAML form. To configure SAML without providing a private key and a certificate you have to opt out from using signed requests.

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. For exact migration dates and times of the migration, refer to maintenance notices on our status page. We will update these notices with the new IPv4 and IPv6 CIDR ranges once they are known.

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.