What’s new in Grafana Cloud

We’re excited to announce that k6 scripted checks in Synthetic Monitoring are now generally available. k6 scripted checks were released in May 2024 as a public preview, to give you the power and flexibility to define your workflow tests in JavaScript, using the k6 API to efficiently author tests. You can use scripted checks to: Test services and applications that require complex logic. Manipulate request/response data and pass data from one request to the next.

We’re excited to announce that k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are now in public preview. With k6 browser checks, you can control a headless Chrome browser using a k6 script. Powered by the k6 browser module, browser checks collect frontend Web Vitals metrics, capture custom performance metrics, and simulate user actions like clicking buttons or filling forms. Any scripts you create are also portable between Synthetic Monitoring and Grafana Cloud k6, as they are backed by the same engine, allowing you to reuse your monitoring scripts for performance testing and vice versa.

At Grafana, we’re comminited to ease of use, and we’ve now introduced a new screen to set up your LDAP server as an Identity Provider. The new user interface makes it much clearer what each option does, and setting up the various configurations is now more transparent. Also, you no longer need to restart the Grafana instance for the new settings to take effect. This feature is available in Public Preview by enabling the feature toggle ssoSettingsLDAP.

Grafana Cloud offers a fully managed experience for Grafana. However, for external plugins, customers must manage plugin version updates themselves. This creates extra maintenance overheard - and an unnecessary step in receiving important security patches, bug fixes or new features. This is why we are now introducing a new feature called Managed Plugins. Managed Plugins replaces the manual update process, and instead automatically updates plugin versions for Grafana Cloud customers, as a more natural SaaS experience.

You can now authenticate the GitHub data source using a GitHub App, providing an alternative to personal access tokens (PATs). GitHub App authentication offers enhanced security by granting more granular permissions, reducing the risk of over-permissioning. For more information, refer to the GitHub data source documentation for detailed instructions on setting up GitHub App authentication.

Introduces a simplified version of the query and alert conditions step for creating Grafana-managed alert rules. The default options streamline rule creation with a cleaner header and a single query and condition. For more complex rules, switch to advanced options to add multiple queries and expressions. This feature is rolling out to Grafana Cloud over the next couple of weeks. Grafana Enterprise and OSS: To use this feature, enable the alertingQueryAndExpressionsStepMode feature toggle.

We’re excited to announce that k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are now in private preview. With k6 browser checks, you can control a headless Chrome browser using a k6 script. Powered by the k6 browser module, browser checks collect frontend Web Vitals metrics, capture custom performance metrics, and simulate user actions like clicking buttons or filling forms. Any scripts you create are also portable between Synthetic Monitoring and Grafana Cloud k6, as they are backed by the same engine, allowing you to reuse your monitoring scripts for performance testing and vice versa.

Introducing a redesigned sharing experience in Dashboards! Previously, the way you shared dashboards could be confusing, with various options like Link, Snapshot, Export, PDF, Report, and Public Dashboard all in one dialog box. This approach didn’t take into consideration one’s specific sharing needs, leading to a suboptimal user experience. The new solution simplifies the sharing process by categorizing these options in a more user-friendly and intuitive manner, inspired by well-designed platforms like Figma and Google Docs.

We’ve renamed the Public dashboards feature, Shared dashboards. This renaming is part of our overall redesign of dashboard sharing and aims to better align externally shared dashboards with other dashboard sharing options. The feature still functions the same way, but the configuration options that were previously part of public dashboards are now found in the Share externally option in the Share drop-down list. While several backend elements, such as API messages, remain the same, user interface labels and references have changed.

The OpenID Connect Discovery URL is available in the Generic OAuth form. The info extracted from this URL will be used to populate the Auth URL, Token URL and API URL fields.

You can generate a new certificate and private key for SAML directly from the UI form. Click on the Generate key and certificate button from the Sign requests tab in the SAML form and then fill in the information you want to be embedded in your generated certificate.

Explore Metrics, generally available in Grafana OSS, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Cloud, offers a queryless experience to visualize time series data stored in Prometheus or any Prometheus-compatible time-series database. Users can search and select a metric name and immediately see the optimal visualization type, whether the metric is a gauge, counter, or histogram. They can also review your selected metric broken down by each of its labels, which makes it easy to spot anomalies by namespace, cluster, or any other attribute.

Explore Profiles offers a queryless experience for easily surfacing insights from profiles stored in Grafana Pyroscope and Grafana Cloud Profiles. Profiling data helps developers identify which parts of a program consume the most resources, such as CPU time, memory, or I/O operations. Profiling, as a signal, lets you either proactively or reactively address performance issues in multiple areas areas. The typical use cases are: Proactive: Cutting costs, addressing latency issues, or optimizing memory usage for applications Reactive: Resolving incidents with line-level accuracy or debugging active latency/memory issues Explore Profiles provides an intuitive interface to specifically support these use cases.

Explore Traces offers a queryless experience for easily surfacing insights from traces stored in Grafana Tempo, Grafana Cloud Traces, and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Explore Traces helps you make sense of your tracing data so you can automatically visualize insights from your Tempo traces data. The app helps you understand errors and latency issues within complex distributed systems. Using the app, you can: Use Rate, Errors, and Duration (RED) metrics derived from traces to both identify and hone in on performance issues Automatically compare sets of selected traces to identify anomalies Visualize related issues and monitor changes over time, all without the complexity of TraceQL This streamlined, intuitive approach helps teams respond to performance issues faster, even if they don’t have deep expertise in query languages.

Contextual root cause analysis workflows Asserts now supports root cause analysis bi-directional navigation between Asserts and Grafana Application Observability and Kubernetes Monitoring. When you are in Application Observability or Kubernetes Monitoring, you can seamlessly explore Assertions in Asserts without losing context. When in Asserts, you can easily navigate to Application Observability or Kubernetes Monitoring. Grafana Cloud Asserts infrastructure solution dashboards Asserts now automatically surfaces KPI dashboards for popular infrastructure components. If you’ve installed any of the following Grafana Cloud integrations, these dashboards automatically appear in Asserts.