What’s new in Grafana Cloud

More easily create silences directly from the Alert rule list view or detail page.

These rule-specific silences are guaranteed to only apply to a single rule and permissions to read, create, update or delete are tied to a user’s permissions for that rule.

Manage silences through Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). In addition to the Grafana open source functionality in Rule-specific silences with permissions, you can choose who can create, edit, and read silences using the following permissions:

• Users with the alert.silences:create permission, scoped within a folder, are able to create silences for rules contained within that folder and its subfolders
• Users with the alert.silences:read permission, scoped within a folder, are able to read silences for rules contained within that folder and its subfolders, and general silences
• Users with the alert.silences:write permission, scoped within a folder, are able to expire and recreate silences for rules contained within that folder and its subfolders

Send alert notifications to Amazon Simple Notifications Service (Amazon SNS).

Grafana Cloud Traces users now get partial results from TraceQL queries as they come in, rather than having to wait for all results to be returned at once. This allows you to start looking at traces matched by your query immediately, speeding up your root cause analysis.

Enables you to easily choose which templates you want to use in your alert notification messages by adding a template selector in the Contact Points form.

Select from existing templates or enter a custom one for your specific needs. You can switch between the two tabs to access the list of available templates and copy them across to the customized version.

Fetching a rule group no longer requires the datasources:query permission for every data source used by the rules within that group. Now, the only requirements are alert.rules:read and folders:read for the folder the group is contained in.

Note: datasources:query is still required to preview an alert rule, regardless of alert rules and folders permissions.

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 two of the improvements that are being introduced as part of this work:

Edit mode

It can be difficult to efficiently navigate through the visually cluttered options during the dashboard editing process. With the introduction of the edit mode, we aim to provide an easier way to discover and interact with the dashboard edit experience.

Fixed positioning of template variables and time picker

Introducing a major performance improvement for the PDF export feature.

Are you tired of waiting for your PDF to be generated or your report to be sent? We’re working on a major update of the dashboard-to-PDF feature to make it faster for large dashboards. The generation time will no longer be proportional to the number of panels in your dashboard. As an example, an SLO dashboard containing around 200 panels has gone from taking more than seven minutes to be generated to only eleven seconds.

Version 2.15.0 of the OpenSearch plugin introduces support for visualizing Service Map for Open Search traces ingested with OpenSearch Data Prepper.

Service map in Grafana enables customers to view a map of their applications built using microservices architecture. With this map, customers can detect performance issues, or increase in error rates in any of their services.

In order to display the map, select Traces query type in the query editor and switch on the Service Map toggle.

The SLO Performance page provides a filterable view as to how your team and service SLOs are performing. This is critical for customers with a large amount of SLOs who would like to view a logical subset. To get started - tag your SLOs with the team_name and/or service_name labels.

Configure OAuth2 authentication for any Alertmanager or Mimir receiver (called Contact Points in Grafana) through the user interface.

OAuth2 is not implemented for the Grafana built-in Alertmanager.

The new settings page provides you with a holistic view of where Grafana-managed alert instances are forwarded.

• Manage which Alertmanagers receive alert instances from Grafana-managed rules without navigating and editing data sources.
• Manage version snapshots for the built-in Alertmanager, which allows administrators to roll back unintentional changes or mistakes in the Alertmanager configuration.
• There is also a visual diff that compares the historical snapshot with the latest configuration to see which changes were made.

We are announcing a license change to the anonymous access feature in Grafana 11. As you may already be aware, anonymous access allows users access to Grafana without login credentials. Anonymous access was an early feature of Grafana to share dashboards; however, we recently introduced Public Dashboards which allows you to share dashboards in a more secure manner. We also noticed that anonymous access inadvertently resulted in user licensing issues. After careful consideration, we have decided to charge for the continued use of anonymous access starting in Grafana 11.

Affected Grafana versions

We’re excited to announce a big update to our Synthetic Monitoring product!

Until now, Synthetic Monitoring has used the Prometheus blackbox exporter to test at the protocol level: HTTP, DNS, TCP, gRPC, and ICMP (for ping and traceroute). This worked well for health and uptime monitoring, but it didn’t cover the full range of synthetic monitoring use cases. With modern applications, it’s important to test not only single endpoints but also complex transactions and critical user journeys.

In the RDS dashboard, monitor your RDS instances within AWS Observability, and troubleshoot common issues like CPU and memory provisioning.