What’s new in Grafana Cloud

Grafana’s dashboard schema has stayed mostly the same for years, originally built around a single grid layout. Over time, it became more complex and harder to work with, mixing different concerns and adding unnecessary complications. In Grafana v12, we’re introducing a new dashboard schema.

With this new architecture based on Scenes, we’re simplifying the schema to make it easier to understand and support powerful new features, like dynamic dashboards, tabs, and canvas-style layouts. The new schema also aims to simplify dashboard management, supporting the as-code approach of Git provisioning.

In the middle of an incident? Deploying a service? Would having every log line available help?

Now with Pause Adaptive Logs, end users of logs can temporarily ingest the logs they need for the service, application, or cluster they care about, without needing to configure anything in Adaptive Logs or work with their centralized team. Get all the cost savings benefits of Adaptive Logs, while making sure your dev teams aren’t stranded during an Incident!

We continue adding more functionality to the IRM mobile app to make incident management smoother and more flexible, allowing you to react instantly from anywhere.

You can now manage incident roles directly from your phone!

We’re giving the community early access to several new experimental themes to celebrate the release of Grafana 12! You can jazz up your Grafana experience with Sapphire dusk, Tron, Gilded grove, Gloom, or Desert bloom. To see the color scheme of a theme before selecting it, click the user icon in the top-right corner of the page and select Change theme.

This opens the Change theme drawer, where you can view all themes:

Last year, we migrated our dashboard architecture to the Scenes library, unlocking a more stable, dynamic, and flexible foundation for the future of Grafana dashboards. Today, we’re excited to showcase what the team has built on top of it, with a strong focus on improving core user workflows: navigating, consuming, and editing dashboards.

More efficient navigation and consumption

• Tabs for better organization: Build well-structured dashboards with tabbed layouts for different contexts and user groups.
• Conditional rendering: Show or hide visualizations based on variable selections or data availability, ensuring relevance. 
• Dashboard content outline: Navigate dashboards fast with this tree structure, making it easier to jump between sections.

Powerful dashboard editing

• New flexible panel layout options: Use custom or auto-grid panel layouts with adjustable settings, like column count, for adaptive dashboard behavior.
• Tabs and row grouping: Group panels into rows or tabs based on your needs. Nested grouping to support complex visual needs is also supported.
• Context-aware editing: Quickly modify tabs or rows, panels, and variables without diving into full edit mode.
• Intelligent side pane: The side pane user interface adapts to your selection, enabling fast actions like duplicating elements or setting layout options.

To try out dynamic dashboards, enable the dashboardNewLayouts feature toggle. Since this is still an experimental feature, we strongly recommend not using it in production environments yet.

Introducing new controls for Logs in Explore

We’re excited to introduce a new controls component for Logs in Explore, designed to make better use of the layout around logs, and give users greater flexibility when working with log data.

Dynamic Alerting with our Forecasting and Outlier Detection features now supports role-based access control by introducing the new roles ML Editor, ML Viewer, Sift Editor and Sift Viewer.

ML Editors can:

• Create/edit/delete forecasts and outlier detectors
• Create/edit/delete holidays

We’ve enhanced our GitHub Actions integration for k6, making it even easier to run performance tests seamlessly within your CI/CD pipelines.

Now, when executing k6 tests in the cloud from a GitHub Actions workflow, the pull request comments will automatically display a rich test summary. This includes key performance metrics like response times, request rates, pass/fail statuses and comparison with the baseline test runs—providing instant, actionable insights without leaving your development workflow.

We are excited to announce that you can now use Terraform to manage Frontend Observability resources.

You can configure a Terraform provider to connect to the Frontend Observability API and manage resources, such as applications.

Grafana Fleet Management now offers an audit trail of configuration pipeline changes. With the Pipelines history feature, your team can collaborate more efficiently, ensure audit compliance, and troubleshoot issues caused by configuration changes.

You can view all changes across all pipelines, review changes to a specific pipeline, compare differences between change events for a pipeline, or copy configuration syntax to revert to an earlier version of a pipeline.

Filter alerts by alert name for improved MTTR.

We are excited to announce role-based access control (RBAC) in Frontend Observability.

RBAC provides a standardized way of granting, changing, and revoking access when it comes to viewing and modifying Grafana resources, such as dashboards, reports, and administrative settings.

We are excited to introduce Geolocation Insights in Frontend Observability.

Frontend applications often serve a globally distributed user base, meaning that your users can be spread across multiple geographical regions and access your application from diverse locations. In some instances, a user’s location can affect the performance of web applications.

We are excited to announce the public preview of k6 extensions in Grafana Cloud k6.

k6 extensions are libraries that expand the k6 core functionality. For example, the faker k6 extension enables users to generate random fake data, which is not available on k6 by default. Extensions allow the k6 open source project to remain small and focused on its core functionality, but still provide users with a way to add new features to cover any use case, such as supporting a new network protocol.

We’re excited to announce the private preview release of new alerting capabilities for Synthetic Monitoring.

You can now create alerts for each check in your Synthetic Monitoring application. For example, you can create an alert based on the number of check failures in a specific time window, with different settings for each one of your checks.