What’s new in Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud k6 Cloud Insights is generally available! Cloud Insights can help you automatically identify potential issues in your system under test or k6 test script and get more accurate and insightful results from your performance tests.

Cloud Insights analyzes telemetry data, such as metrics, logs, and traces generated during a test run, to identify issues and make recommendations on how to fix them. This can help you and your team save time when pinpointing the root cause of performance issues in your applications.

We are excited to release Explore Logs to most of our Cloud customers in public preview!

Explore Logs helps developers quickly troubleshoot and gain insights from logs without needing to run a query.

The Adobe Analytics data source plugin allows you to retrieve reports data from Adobe Analytics.

As a continuation of our efforts to standardize tooltips across visualizations, we’ve updated canvas visualization tooltips to be supported for all elements tied to data. Besides the element name and data, the tooltip now also displays the timestamp. This is a step forward from the previous implementation where tooltips were shown only if data links were configured.

Data links improvements

We’ve updated canvas visualizations so that you can add data links to canvas elements without using an override. The Selected element configuration now includes a Data links section where you can add data links to elements using the same steps as in other visualizations.

A new home page, Kubernetes Overview, gives you a snapshot of both healthy objects and potential issues.

Additional user experience enhancements include:

• Overview and network tabs
• Deep links into Clusters
• More linking into root cause analysis
• Visual indicators for every Kubernetes object, including workload type, Pod, Cluster, and namespace

For the past few months, we’ve been working on stabilizing the k6-browser module and its API, as well as improving the performance of Grafana Cloud k6 in handling browser tests with a high number of VUs.

Today, we’re excited to announce that browser tests in Grafana Cloud k6 are generally available! You can now run browser tests with multiple VUs to better understand your application’s user experience and help you find and fix frontend performance issues.

You can now view a detailed timeline for a Grafana k6 browser test when executing it in Grafana Cloud k6, as well as any screenshots taken during that test run.

The Grafana k6 browser module now uses OpenTelemetry to generate spans and traces that match a virtual user’s behavior and interactions with the browser as they execute the code in your test script. The results are streamed to Grafana Cloud k6 and displayed in the Browser Timeline section of the test results page. Here, you can visualize details such as load time, Web Vital metrics, and executed methods for each page in your script and get a better understanding of your app’s performance.

To be more aligned with the OpenTelementry specification, Grafana Cloud Traces will return RetryInfo to correctly indicate retryable errors.

For more information, refer to Retry on RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED failure.

Cost overview tab

Use the Cost Overview tab to see a 90-day view of total compute cost, average cost per Pod, and average Pod count. This 90-day period is divided into the prior 30 days, the last 30 days from the current date, and an estimate of the next 30 days.

For the past few months we’ve been working on a major update of our Dashboards architecture and migrated it to the Scenes library. This migration provides us with more stable, dynamic, and flexible dashboards as well as setting the foundation for what we envision the future of Grafana dashboards will be. Here are four of the improvements that are being introduced as part of this work:

Edit mode

The GeoMap panel can now be used with a keyboard! Focus the map area, move around with the arrows keys and zoom in and out using + and -.

Panel shortcut keyboard support

We have panel shortcuts, which previously only worked on whichever panel you hovered over. It now also takes into account the keyboard focus.

Heading improvements

We have recently released v2 of the GitLab data source plugin. The plugin was updated to the latest GitLab API version which unfortunately comes with some potential breaking changes to the Projects queries

• public field has been removed. Instead the already existing visibility field should be used
• public_builds are now called public_jobs
  
  For more information please refer to the official GitLab API documentation

Kubernetes Monitoring has added more troubleshooting tools:

• Find deleted Clusters, Nodes, Pods, containers, workloads, and namespace
• Zoom into an area on the graph to narrow the time range
• Jump directly to the list of Clusters, Nodes, and workloads from the home page

Find deleted objects

You can find deleted objects, such as a Node shown in this example:

Kubernetes Monitoring has added more troubleshooting tools:

• Find deleted Clusters, Nodes, Pods, containers, workloads, and namespaces
• Zoom into an area on the graph to narrow the time range
• Jump directly to the list of Clusters, Nodes, workloads, and alerts from the home page

Find deleted objects

It’s easier to give your network access to Synthetic Monitoring public probes using https://allowlists.grafana.com/synthetics. This publishes up-to-date CIDR ranges of all public probe locations from a single URL, with data in JSON format to support machine readability and automation.

The old method for allow-listing - a DNS record for each probe location - is deprecated as of June 17, 2024. Starting August 1, 2024 we will no longer support DNS records for each probe location.