Grafana Cloud updates: Fleet Management is now GA, a unified app for IRM, and more

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics).

In case you missed them, here’s our monthly round-up of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

And if you’re not a Grafana Cloud user yet, sign up for an account today! You can try any of these features (and more) for free with our generous Cloud Free plan.

Fleet Management is now GA

In November, we announced a public preview of Grafana Fleet Management, a feature that allows you to manage multiple telemetry collector deployments at scale. You can use Fleet Management to remotely configure your collectors, monitor collector health, and assign configurations to collectors based on their attributes.

This month, we’re excited to share that Fleet Management is now generally available, and also includes a number of new features to help you monitor and manage your fleet of collectors. 

Some of the highlights of the GA release include:

• Provisioning your collectors and configuration pipelines with Terraform.
• Deploying and configuring collectors as native Kubernetes resources.
• Adding pre-built configuration pipelines from the integration catalog.

To learn more, please check out our Fleet Management documentation. You can also watch a demo in the video below.

A new, unified Grafana Cloud IRM app

This month, we rolled out Grafana Cloud IRM, a new solution that merges the OnCall and Incident apps to create a more unified and faster incident response and management experience within Grafana Cloud.

With the new Grafana Cloud IRM app, you can now see all your alert groups and incidents on one, consolidated homepage. This lays the groundwork to give you a more consistent user experience for functionalities, such as a single webhook system.

The Grafana Cloud IRM app, which will roll out in all Grafana Cloud environments this month, will appear in the left-hand panel alongside other Grafana Cloud solutions. For the next month, we’ll continue to show the legacy OnCall and Incident apps in the panel along with a notification to guide users to the new unified IRM app. Existing links will also continue to work, redirecting users to the same page within the IRM app.

You can learn more about Grafana Cloud IRM in our documentation, and by watching the video below.

Data visualization and dashboard enhancements 

We’re always exploring new ways to help you quickly visualize and derive insights from your data. This month, we have updates to share related to geomaps, actions, and dashboard transformations. 

Improved performance in geomap visualizations

We’ve officially moved to the Web Graphics Library (WebGL) — a JavaScript API for rendering high-performance interactive 3D and 2D graphics — for marker layers on the geomap visualization. A marker layer allows you to display data points as different marker shapes, such as circles, squares, triangles, or stars. 

This feature, now generally available, provides a significant boost in both performance and stability, a change that is especially noticeable for larger datasets. The following GIFs demonstrate what a 1,000 marker layers would look like before and after switching to WebGL.

Before WebGL:

After WebGL:

You can read more about geomaps in our technical docs. 

Visualization actions are now GA

In Grafana Cloud, actions let you trigger basic, unauthenticated API calls to kickstart certain processes, like shutting down a server, directly from a dashboard panel. And now, these actions are generally available for the following visualizations:

• Time series
• Bar chart
• Candlestick
• State timeline
• Status history
• Table
• Trend
• XY chart

You can find actions under the Data links and actions section of the panel editor pane (previously the Data links section).

New Actions cell type for table visualizations

Speaking actions, the table visualization now includes a new Actions cell type, which lets you trigger actions directly from table cells. This enhancement, also now generally available, allows you to define custom actions, such as triggering external workflows, from within a table column.

You can learn more about using actions in our documentation. 

Dashboard variables now supported for all transformations

Variables are a powerful feature that allow you to make your dashboards more dynamic. They allow you to filter and search for the data you care about most, without having to edit queries or rebuild dashboards. Meanwhile, transformations are another helpful feature that allow you to manipulate data returned by a query before applying a visualization.

In previous releases, we added support for dashboard variables to a small number of transformations. Now this functionality has been added to all transformations, where applicable. 

All text input fields in transformations accept variable syntax:

OTel resource attribute labels in Grafana Cloud Metrics 

OpenTelemetry metrics use resource attributes to describe the set of characteristics associated with a given resource, or entity, that produces telemetry data. For example, a host resource might have multiple attributes, including an ID, an image, and a type.

This month, we started rolling out a default list of resource attributes as labels on Grafana Cloud Metrics — the fully managed, highly scalable metrics service in Grafana Cloud — to simplify data exploration and correlation for users sending OTel metrics. We expect the total rollout time to be a few weeks.

You can learn more in our Grafana Cloud Metrics documentation. 

Updates to data source plugins

Standardized links on plugin details pages

We’re excited to share a big improvement to the Grafana plugin catalog that benefits both Grafana users and plugin developers: the introduction of standardized links on plugin details pages.

This change makes it easier for users to engage with developers and find the essential information they need to get the most out of a plugin. Developers, in turn, will gain more valuable feedback and support from the community.

Previously, plugin details pages in the Grafana catalog relied on custom links provided by developers, leading to inconsistencies in information being available. These are still configurable, but are now augmented with standard links for key elements, such as raising an issue or navigating to the source code repository if the plugin is open source.

This feature is available in public preview. We recommend plugin developers check the inferred links by viewing their plugin in the catalog. To read more, please reference our documentation. 

LBAC for metrics data sources 

We know it can be difficult for teams to collaborate on dashboards when they use a lot of different data sources. To help address this, we’re rolling out Label Based Access Control (LBAC) for metrics data sources, meaning data sources that are created from Grafana Mimir.

This feature, which is now experimental, allows fine-grained access control to data sources by filtering metrics based on labels. It lets administrators configure access rules for teams, ensuring users only query data relevant to their assigned label permissions. 

Feature highlights include:

• The ability for teams to view queries to the same data source with different LBAC rules applied
• Configuration using the API and the UI
• Simplified LBAC notation is automatically converted into correct custom headers

We also recommend the following best practices when using this feature:

• Only add query permissions for teams that will have LBAC rules and remove default Viewer and Editor query permissions.
• As an initial setup, define as few rules as possible for each team, making sure they’re additive rather than negating one another.
• For validating rules, test each rule in Explore view. This allows you to see the metrics that would be returned for the specific rule.

To learn more about this feature, please check out our technical docs. 

Grafana SLO support for Graphite, Splunk, and AppDynamics data sources 

Grafana SLO — an application that makes it easy to create, manage, and scale service level objectives, SLO dashboards, and error budget alerts in Grafana Cloud — now supports Graphite, Splunk, and AppDynamics data sources. 

This update enables teams to monitor and improve the reliability of even more services, as well as track SLOs across a broader range of observability data.

Please check out our documentation to learn more about Grafana SLO. 

New alerting features

Lastly, this month’s alerting updates for Grafana Cloud users include:

• Support for Jira Service Management contact point: In response to the recent deprecation of OpsGenie, Grafana Alerting now supports Jira Service Management as a Grafana-managed contact point. 
• Alert rule version history: Grafana-managed alerts now support version history. Simply navigate to the Alert details view of any Grafana-managed alert rule and click the Version tab to view, compare, and restore your alert’s historical versions.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with incident response and management. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!