What’s new in Grafana Cloud

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.

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. This is available for a growing set of Grafana Labs created data source plugins which can be installed from the Catalog. Plugins built into Grafana already update as part of the Grafana server upgrades.

Create recording rules for Grafana-managed alert rules to calculate frequently needed expressions or computationally expensive expressions in advance and save the result as a new set of time series. Querying this new time series is faster, especially for dashboards since they query the same expression every time the dashboards refresh. Previously, this was only available for data-source managed alert rules.

In Grafana OSS and Enterprise, you can create both Grafana-managed and data source-managed recording rules if you enable the grafanaManagedRecordingRules feature flag.

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.

We’ve updated several visualizations so that now you can add actions to them. The panel configuration now includes a Data links and actions section where you can add actions that can each be configured to call an API endpoint.

Also, we’ve also added the ability to control the order in which actions are displayed in the tooltip by dragging and dropping them.

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.

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.

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.

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 Logs offers a queryless experience for easily surfacing insights from logs stored in Grafana Loki, Grafana Cloud Logs, and Grafana Enterprise Logs.

You can spot troublesome services without running a single query, and quickly add filters with point-and-click interactions. Explore Logs generates visualizations of log volumes to let you easily detect anomalies or related changes across labels and over time. Patterns help you identify sources of signal or filter our sources of noise in your log line content, further accelerating your troubleshooting process.

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. Additionally, they can see related metrics based on your selected metrics for a more comprehensive understanding of their environment.

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.

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.