What’s new in Grafana Cloud

You can now use the Grafana Cloud Traces integration with Grafana Cloud k6 to quickly debug failed performance tests and proactively improve application reliability.

Distributed tracing in Grafana Cloud k6 only requires two things:

• An application instrumented for tracing with Grafana Cloud Traces.
• Adding a few lines of code to your existing k6 scripts.

The new browse dashboards interface features a more compact design, making it easier to navigate, search for, and manage for your folders and dashboards. The new interface also has many performance improvements, especially for instances with a large number of folders and dashboards.

To make using folders easier and more consistent, there is no longer a special General folder. Dashboards without a folder, or dashboards previously in General, are now shown at the root level.

Configure with Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart using a streamlined process. With this method, you can set on/off switches to gather metrics, logs, events, traces, and cost metrics. (Release 1.2.0)

You can change the data source you are viewing on the Cost and Efficiency views. (Release 1.2.1)

The Kafka integration is available for use in Kubernetes Monitoring. (Release 1.3.6)

Click Predict Memory usage to predict namespace memory usage on the namespace detail page. (Release 1.2.1)

Quickly switch between the Cluster, namespace, workload, and Node views on the Cluster Navigation page using tabs. (Release 1.3.0)

Collect traces when you configure Kubernetes Monitoring, and then use Tempo to create search queries. Refer to Navigate to traces for more information. (Release 1.3.0)

You can now create correlations using either the Administration page or provisioning, regardless of whether a data source was provisioned or not. In previous versions of Grafana, if a data source was provisioned, the only way to add correlations to it was also with provisioning. Now, that’s no longer the case, and you can easily create new correlations mixing both methods—using the Administration page or provisioning.

To enable this feature, contact Grafana Support.

Use the Grafana Alerting - Grafana OnCall integration to effortlessly connect alerts generated by Grafana Alerting with Grafana OnCall. From there, you can route them according to defined escalation chains and schedules.

To learn more, refer to the Grafana OnCall integration for Alerting documentation.

The Tempo data source now supports query-type template variables. With this update, you can create variables for which the values are a list of attribute names or attribute values seen on spans received by Tempo.

To learn more, refer to the following video demo, as well as the Grafana Variables documentation.

The Datadog data source supports blocking API requests based on upstream rate limits (for metric queries). With this update, you can set a rate limit percentage at which the plugin stops sending queries.

To learn more, refer to Datadog data source settings, as well as the following video demo.

The Datadog data source now supports log aggregation. This feature helps aggregate logs/events into buckets and compute metrics and time series. For more information, refer to Datadog log aggregation.

With the current release, we enabled RBAC permission validation (rbac.permission_validation_enabled setting) by default. This means that the permissions provided in the request during custom role creation or update are validated against the list of available permissions and their scopes. If the request contains a permission that is not available or the scope of the permission is not valid, the request is rejected with an error message.