What's new from Grafana Labs

When multiple dashboards use the same variable, creating and maintaining it separately in each dashboard can lead to duplicated work and inconsistent configuration. Cross-dashboard variables let you define a variable once and reuse it across multiple dashboards in your Grafana organization.

Create and manage cross-dashboard variables from Dashboards > Variables. You can scope a variable in either of two ways:

• Global: Available to all dashboards in the organization.
• Folder: Available only to dashboards in the same folder.

When you use the Grafana mobile app on more than one device, you might want alerts on the phone you carry while your other devices stay quiet. For each mobile push notification step, you can now choose which paired device receives alerts, or keep sending them to all your active devices. You can manage this in the Grafana mobile app or on the Mobile app tab of your Grafana user profile.

You can now improve your alert rule quality with the Alert Advisor. Alert rules are easier to act on when they carry the right context, like a runbook URL to guide investigation or a team label to route notifications. With the Alert Advisor in Grafana, you can:

• Define which labels and annotations are required for Grafana-managed alert rules.
• Find rules with missing required labels or annotations and update them.
• Optionally enforce selected requirements on supported provisioning writes.

Auto-apply is now generally available! By enabling auto-apply, Grafana Cloud Adaptive Metrics automatically applies recommendations for segments, so you don’t have to review the list after every analysis.

To get started, enable auto-apply for the Default segment if you haven’t created any segments yet. If you already have segments, enable it for multiple segments or for an individual segment, and choose Coverage-first or Cost-first.

Connection KPIs let you reduce the metrics cost of inbound and outbound service connections without turning the service graph off. You choose how much performance data Grafana Cloud Traces generates for each client-server pair.

Latency histograms add many more series than request and error counts. Generate all KPIs keeps requests, errors, and latency. Generate requests and errors drops those histograms, which is usually the largest saving, while traffic and errors stay visible.

Session Replay in Frontend Observability is open to everyone. You no longer need the waitlist form from the August 2026 public preview announcement.

You can turn Session Replay on directly from the Frontend Observability app setup flow. On the Configure instrumentation step, enable Allow end user data collection under Session Replay and pick a privacy masking preset.

Incident custom fields in Grafana IRM work in the Grafana Cloud app for Slack. Responders can record the details your team tracks without switching to the browser.

You can now filter and sort alert groups in Grafana IRM by when they were created, last received an alert, acknowledged, or resolved.

Want to review what your team resolved last week? Select Resolved At from the drop-down next to the time range picker, then select Last week.

When you silence an alert group in Grafana IRM, the silence now lasts for the full duration you choose, even if the source resolves and fires again.

Previously, if the source sent a resolve signal while an alert group was silenced, the alert group resolved immediately and the silence ended with it. If the alert was flapping, the next firing alert started escalation again, so a three-hour silence could end after a few seconds.

Escalation chains in Grafana IRM have new options that give you more control over who gets paged, and when.

Spread pages across everyone on a shift, or pull in the responder coming off the last shift. When an alert group is waiting, move it to its next step without waiting out the timer.

Different readers need different things from a report. An executive may want clean pages that put the panels first, while a client expects your branding and page numbers throughout.

Custom PDF headers and footers let you shape your reports around the people who read them. Decide what the header shows, build a footer from the pieces you need, and style the text to suit your audience.

Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring now integrates with the knowledge graph, available in public preview. When a check fails or slows down, you can see the service it monitors, explore its dependencies, and compare check results with service health to narrow down where to investigate.

In June 2026, we announced the public preview release of folders in Synthetic Monitoring. With folders, you can group checks by team, service, or environment so the right checks are always easy to find and act on a whole group at once instead of one check at a time.

Dashboard plans, now in public preview, let you review and refine a proposed dashboard before Grafana Assistant builds it. Describe what you want to monitor, and the Assistant presents a plan in chat that includes the dashboard title, tabs or rows, panels, visualization types, and variables.

If you have the required permissions to manage roles or role assignments, you can revoke access without holding the permissions being removed. This applies when you update or delete a role, or remove role assignments through the /api/access-control/ APIs.

If you delegate role management, review who should have this broader revocation authority, as outlined in the advance notice.