What's new from Grafana Labs

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon CloudWatch metric streams.

CloudWatch metric streams with Amazon Data Firehose offer you a less expensive, highly accurate way to import metrics from AWS into Grafana Cloud. As with CloudWatch metrics scrape, CloudWatch metric streams do not require you to deploy or maintain Alloy agents or servers and can be configured as code using Terraform or using a CloudFormation template.

You can now control the direction of connections between canvas elements by mapping the direction to a field value. A positive value draws the connection arrow forward, a negative value draws it in reverse, and a value of zero removes the directional arrow entirely. Alternatively, you can assign a fixed direction value.

This is especially useful for visualizing real-time data flows, system states, or transitions, where directionality changes based on metrics.

The Tooltip from field option in table visualizations allows you to use the values from another field (or column) in a tooltip.

When you toggle the switch on, you can select from a drop-down list any of the fields in the table to be used as the source of the tooltip content. All table fields are available for selection, whether visible or hidden.

We are excited to announce the general availability of k6 extensions in Grafana Cloud k6.

You can now seamlessly use extensions from both Grafana Cloud and the k6 CLI:

• Local execution: k6 run test.js
• Cloud execution: k6 cloud run test.js
• Local execution, streaming test results: k6 cloud run test.js --local-execution

Grafana Assistant, Grafana’s AI tool within Grafana, is now available in Public Preview.

Grafana Assistant is an AI tool that can…

• … create dashboards.
• … write queries.
• … help you get onboarded.
• … support you in learning Grafana.
• … support in investigations and incidents.

The Jenkins data source allows you to query and visualize metrics such as projects, builds, build queues, nodes and load statistics from within Grafana.

This enterprise plugin includes two built-in dashboards to help you quickly get started visualizing Jenkins data:

• Jenkins Overview dashboard provides an overview of the Jenkins instance, including all projects, nodes, executor status and build queue.
• Jenkins DORA Metrics dashboard provides information on four key metrics used to assess software development team performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore service. These metrics focus on both the speed and stability of software delivery.

We’re excited to announce the public preview release of secrets management for Synthetic Monitoring, available to all Grafana Cloud users.

Secrets management gives you a centralized place to securely store sensitive data like API keys, passwords, and tokens.

We’re excited to announce the integration of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) into Grafana Cloud Traces and into open-source Tempo (merged, available in Tempo 2.9). MCP, a standard developed by Anthropic, allows data sources to expose data and functionality to Large Language Models (LLMs) via an agent.

This integration opens up new possibilities for interacting with tracing data. You can now connect LLM-powered tools like Claude Code or Cursor to Grafana Cloud Traces, enabling you to:

• Explore services and understand interactions: LLMs can be used to teach new developers about service interactions within an application by analyzing tracing data. For instance, a new developer could ask the AI to explain how their services interact. The AI would use live tracing data from Cloud Traces to answer these questions.
• Diagnose and investigate errors: You can leverage LLMs to identify and diagnose errors in your systems. The AI can answer questions like “Are there errors in my services?”, “What endpoints are being impacted”, etc?
• Optimize performance and reduce latency: LLMs can assist in identifying the causes of latency and guiding optimization efforts. By analyzing trace data, an LLM can summarize operations in a request path, pinpoint bottlenecks, and even suggest code changes to improve performance, such as parallelizing operations.

Grafana IRM outgoing webhooks now support incident events, providing a unified experience for automating alert group and incident workflows. You can configure webhooks from the Outgoing Webhooks tab and trigger requests based on key incident lifecycle events, such as when an incident is declared, updated, or resolved.

With this update, you can:

• Customize webhook requests with support for any HTTP method
• Use templated URLs, headers, and request bodies
• Dynamically reference incident data and prior webhook responses
• View webhook execution details directly from the incident or alert group timeline
• Manage incident-related webhook configurations using Terraform

We’re excited to share a new integration between Tailscale and Grafana Cloud that lets you query data sources on your Tailscale network directly from your Grafana Cloud stack.

Tailscale allows you to create a secure network (called a tailnet) by directly connecting users, devices, and resources. This new integration adds an ephemeral machine to your tailnet on your behalf. You can add tags to these machines, which allow you to configure Tailscale ACLs and Grants, giving you full control of what your Grafana Cloud stack can access.

The canvas visualization editor now offers a completely re-engineered pan and zoom experience.

You can now place elements anywhere—even beyond panel edges—without disrupting connections or layouts. Background images stay consistent, connection anchors rotate with elements, and an optional Zoom to content toggle automatically fits your canvas content to any view. Constraints remain intact thanks to a transparent root container, ensuring layout behavior stays reliable across pan and zoom operations.

Constraint system support

Grafana SLO now supports exporting existing SLOs in HCL format and generating HCL during new SLO creation so users can use Terraform to manage their SLOs.

• Users looking to export an existing SLO into HCL format should locate their SLO on the Manage SLO screen, click the More drop-down, and select Export
• Users looking to create a new SLO to be exported should navigate to the Manage SLO screen, click the more drop-down on the top right of the page, and select New SLO for export

You can now choose to enable or disable tooltips in canvas visualizations. The Tooltip mode setting controls the display of tooltips when hovering over elements in a canvas that are connected to data, data links, or actions.

Additionally, you can now use the Disable for one-click elements option to selectively hide tooltips on elements that have one-click functionality enabled. This enhancement prevents tooltips from interfering with one-click interactions while still allowing tooltips on other elements.

The process for configuring alerting using Faro data coming from your frontend apps has just gotten a whole lot easier. Introducing Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability out of the box alerting. We have taken the first step in helping users configure Grafana-managed alerts without needing any previous experience with alerting in Grafana Cloud. 

Using our simple workflows you can enable and configure alerts based on your web app’s errors and web vital metrics. Find and troubleshoot issues sooner now that alert configuration and rules are handled automatically. Additionally, these alerts can serve as templates for you to expand the alerting coverage of your frontend apps. 

You can now add Status updates to incidents in Grafana IRM to help keep your team and stakeholders informed during an incident.

Status updates are structured messages that communicate key information throughout the incident lifecycle. Whether you’re confirming impact, escalating to another team, or resolving the issue, use status updates to help track and share progress in a consistent, high-signal way.