What’s new in Grafana Cloud

The Infinity data source plugin now supports gzip compression for outgoing requests by default, improving data transfer efficiency and dashboard performance. This enhancement reduces payload size, helping users working with large datasets or real-time dashboards experience faster load times and lower network strain.

Previously, adding gzip manually as a request header caused parsing issues. With this update, requests automatically include the Accept-Encoding: gzip header, ensuring smoother data retrieval and visualization.

The Infinity data source plugin now defaults to the backend parser when creating new queries in dashboards or Explore. Previously, the frontend parser was the default, limiting access to backend features like alerts, recorded queries, and public dashboards.

Existing queries using the frontend parser will continue to work as before. If any issues arise, switching the parser to Frontend in the query settings may help. This update improves compatibility with Grafana’s backend features from the start.

The Infinity data source plugin now allows passing Grafana metadata—such as user ID and data source UID—to underlying APIs as headers or query parameters. This gives data source admins more control over how metadata is shared with external APIs.

Admins can configure these settings at the data source level, ensuring that metadata is passed consistently while preventing users from overriding values in individual queries. Since different APIs require metadata in different formats, this feature offers flexibility in how values are forwarded.

The Infinity data source plugin now supports additional HTTP methods—PATCH, PUT, and DELETE—through the allowDangerousHTTPMethods configuration. This improvement gives you greater flexibility when interacting with APIs that require these methods, making it easier to work with a wider range of use cases.

Previously, Infinity only supported GET and POST, as it was designed for read-only queries. However, some use cases require modifying data via PATCH, PUT, or DELETE. Since these methods can perform destructive actions, they are disabled by default.

It’s easier than ever to stay on top of token rotation with these latest updates:

📩 Automated email reminders – Receive email notifications before a token expires, ensuring a seamless transition.

Grafana Cloud now supports native cross-region connectivity using AWS PrivateLink.

Previously, AWS PrivateLink only supported connectivity to VPC endpoint services in the same region. Connecting to services in a different region required setting VPC Peering between both regions, and this was complicated in some environments.

Grafana OnCall and Grafana Incident are now unified into a single application: Grafana IRM. This update simplifies workflows, consolidates configurations, and provides a more integrated experience for managing on-call schedules, alert escalations, and incident response. Changes include:

• One app for on-call and incident response – On-call and incident settings are now managed in a single location. No more switching between separate apps in Grafana Cloud.
• New My IRM dashboard – Get a complete view of ongoing alerts and incidents in one place.
• Seamless transition – Existing OnCall and Incident users retain all data; all on-call schedules, integrations, and settings remain intact.

The Grafana Cloud IRM app is gradually rolling out between March 17-24, 2025, and will be available in all Cloud instances by the end of March.

When you configure Kubernetes Monitoring, you can select Fleet Management for monitoring, configuring, and managing your Alloy deployments.

Additional buttons are available on any Cluster detail page for you to immediately access the namespaces and workloads on the Cluster.

We’re excited to announce that Grafana Fleet Management is generally available! Since launching Fleet Management in public preview last November, we’ve been working to add more features to help you monitor and manage your collector fleets at scale. Here are some of these enhancements:

• Provision your collectors and configuration pipelines with Terraform.
• Deploy and configure collectors as native Kubernetes resources.
• Add pre-built configuration pipelines from the integration catalog.
• Learn how to streamline your remote configuration workflows to help you save time and money.

Get started with Grafana Fleet Management today!

Standardized links for plugins to simplify user-developer interactions

We’re pleased to announce an improvement to the Grafana plugin catalog that benefits both Grafana users and plugin developers. By introducing standardized links on plugin details pages, we’re making 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 valuable feedback and support from their audience.

On March 10, 2025, we started rolling out a default list of resource attributes as labels on Grafana Cloud Metrics. The goal is to simplify data exploration and correlation for customers sending OpenTelemetry metrics. We expect the total rollout time to be a few weeks.

We’ve moved over to WebGL for geomap marker layers. You can expect a significant increase in performance and stability, which is especially noticeable for larger datasets.

The following examples show a comparison of before and after switching to WebGL.

Before

After

The alert rule history

Alerting has added a new feature that allows you to review, compare, and restore previous alert rules.

In response to the recent deprecation of OpsGenie, Grafana Alerting has added support for Jira Service Management as a Grafana Managed contact point. You can ensure you don’t miss any critical alerts by updating your OpsGenie contact points to use Jira Service Management.

Grafana Managed Alerts now supports version history. You can view, compare, and restore your alert’s historical versions by navigating to the alert details view of any Grafana Managed Alert rule and clicking the Version tab.