What’s new in Grafana Cloud

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.

Introducing Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability private source map uploads. Frontend Observability in Grafana Cloud can use source maps to convert stack traces from JavaScript browser errors back into their original representation. That way, users can see the line of code that caused the issue.

Up until this point, source maps must have been available publicly available on the Internet so Grafana Cloud could fetch them. Many customers find this objectionable because they need to expose some of their IP.

We’ve made a number of small improvements to the data visualization experience in Grafana.

Table cell text wrapping

A longstanding feature request for the table visualization is to allow wrapping of text within cells. In Grafana 11.1 we’ve added this capability! By default, the column with the longest text is selected for wrapping. You can also configure wrapping manually using field overrides.

We’re promoting XY chart out of public preview and into general availability.

XY charts provide a way to visualize arbitrary x and y values in a graph so that you can easily show the relationship between two variables. XY charts are typically used to create scatter plots. You can also use them to create bubble charts where field values determine the size of each bubble:

Introducing Catchpoint data source plugin.

The Catchpoint data source plugin allows you to query and visualize Tests, RUM and SLO data from within Grafana.

Running tests has become common in recent years, but it’s only part of the story. The real value lies not just in testing but also in analyzing the results. Was the system under test stable? How was its performance?

On top of that, today’s systems are becoming increasingly more complex. When something goes wrong, finding the root cause can be difficult and time-consuming. Was it a browser, application, or database issue? Is there telemetry data that could help pinpoint the root cause? Can we make the system more transparent by eliminating its black box characteristics?

Grafana Explore now allows for logs filtering and pinning in content outline.

Filtering Logs: All log levels are now automatically available in the content outline. You can filter by log level, currently supported for Elasticsearch and Loki data sources. To select multiple filters, hold down the command key on Mac or the control key on Windows while clicking.

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).