What’s new in Grafana Cloud

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.

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:

• Instantly view your primary and backup on-call schedules, so you always know when you’re up.
• Quickly monitor which alerts are firing, acknowledged, or silenced.
• Easily scan through active incidents, their severity, and the affected services or teams.

Why it matters

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.

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.

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. If there are multiple actions for an element, the first action in the list has the one-click functionality.

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 v11.2 or newer.

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.

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.

We are excited to announce the public preview release of the Grafana Aurora Data Source. You can create alerts, query and visualize your data from AWS Aurora with Grafana. This data source supports MySQL-compatible and PostgreSQL-compatible Aurora DB engines.

You can find out more about the data source in the Aurora data source documentation.

Use the Grafana Alerting - MQTT integration to send notifications to an MQTT broker when your alerts are firing.

Explore now supports forward direction search for Loki logs searches. This allows users to seamlessly browse logs in a time range in forward chronological order (for example, tracing a specific user’s actions using logs).

To use this feature, select Forward for the Direction option. Note that in the screenshot above, logs are rendered beginning from the starting time period of the query, not the end.

Cloud Provider Observability provides a unified experience to manage multiple cloud environments and streamline your monitoring and troubleshooting.

In addition to AWS, you can easily set up Azure and Google Cloud Platform to view:

• Logs
• Preconfigured service dashboards like the following one showing data for Azure Elastic Pool