Grafana Cloud updates: New observability as code tools, Grafana Drilldown enhancements, and more

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack: Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics.

With GrafanaCON 2025 — and the release of Grafana 12 — earlier this month, there are a ton of Grafana Cloud updates to share. We’ll cover many of them here in this post, but you can also check out our What’s new in Grafana Cloud documentation to explore all the latest features. 

And if you’re not a Grafana Cloud user yet, sign up for an account today! You can try any of these features (and more) for free with our generous Cloud Free plan.

Observability as code

Grafana 12 introduces a suite of observability as code tools that help you automate observability workflows. These features allow you to version, validate, and deploy dashboards like any other code base in your organizations, reducing manual processes and increasing consistency across teams. 

Git Sync

With Git Sync, you can bring Git workflows directly into the Grafana UI, allowing you to merge dashboard changes, create branches, and open pull requests — all without leaving Grafana.

Git Sync is available to a limited number of Grafana Cloud users in private preview. If you are interested in trying the feature, please complete this Git Sync interest form.

To learn more, check out our Git Sync deep dive blog post or Git Sync documentation. 

Dynamic dashboards 

To effectively monitor and troubleshoot a system, you need access to a lot of observability signals. However, when you try to fit all those signals into a single dashboard, it becomes ungainly quickly. Dynamic dashboards introduce a set of experimental tools to help you display just the right information at the right time, so you can find what you need faster.

Learn more in our dynamic dashboards blog or our dynamic dashboards docs. 

App Platform with consistent, versioned APIs

With Grafana 12, we introduced consistent, versioned, resource-oriented APIs for managing things like dashboards and folders. 

Under the hood, Grafana is adopting a Kubernetes-inspired architecture, and using Kubernetes API patterns for consistency and robustness. While we leverage the Kubernetes style, we made this invisible to users who don’t want to interact with our APIs. Grafana continues to run as it always has, using your configured database. The new platform simply provides a stable, predictable base for all our observability as code tooling. 

To learn more about the new API structure, which is currently experimental in Grafana Cloud, check out our dashboard API documentation. 

Foundation SDK: Define dashboards in code

The Grafana foundation SDK, currently in public preview, provides libraries for defining Grafana resources, such as dashboards, programmatically using popular programming languages like Go or Java. Instead of crafting JSON by hand, you can use strongly typed builders to create, validate, and manipulate resources within your existing development workflows and CI/CD pipelines. 

To learn more, check out our foundation SDK documentation.

Grafana CLI (grafanactl)

Many as code setups rely on custom scripts hitting Grafana APIs, especially in CI/CD. The new Grafana CLI, called grafanactl, offers an official, streamlined alternative for both automation pipelines and local development that will greatly simplify the way you can work with Grafana as code and help eliminate custom tooling. 

For more information about the new Grafana CLI, currently in public preview, you can read our CLI documentation.

New Terraform resource

Manually adding resources to Grafana’s Terraform provider over time led to inconsistencies. We’re addressing this by building new resources directly on our App Platform APIs. This foundational approach means future resources can be generated automatically, ensuring they all look and behave consistently. 

The first resource built this way, for dashboards, is available now in public preview. 

To learn more about these observability as code tools and features, check out this in-depth blog post. 

SCIM and user provisioning

Previously, provisioned users needed to individually sign in to Grafana to exist within the platform, and administrators faced the time-consuming task of creating and managing teams.

Now, with SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) integration, you can seamlessly synchronize Grafana Teams directly from your Identity Provider (IdP). This enables faster team onboarding, automated access management, and simplified administration.

To start using SCIM, currently in public preview in Grafana Cloud Advanced, enable the enableSCIM feature toggle. You can learn more in this blog post, and in our technical documentation.

Other performance and ease-of-use improvements 

The Grafana 12 release also includes a number of other updates that make it easier and faster to get the insights you need. 

SQL expressions

Have you ever had to mash up data from different sources like logs from Grafana Loki and BI data from Salesforce? Traditionally, this meant exporting to a central warehouse, writing ETL jobs — or just giving up and doing math in a spreadsheet.

Enter SQL expressions, server-side expressions that manipulate and transform the results of data source queries using MySQL-like syntax. SQL expressions, available in private preview in Grafana Cloud Advanced, allow you to easily query and transform your data for everything from simple filters to highly complex, multi-step transformations. 

If you want to try SQL expressions as a private preview, follow our enablement documentation. To learn more, check out our SQL expressions documentation. 

Faster and more robust table panels 

You can load, sort, and filter large tables faster than ever before now that the table visualization has been refactored to use the react-data-grid library. 

The table panel in Grafana now handles massive data sets with ease. Think sorting through 40,000+ rows and almost 20 columns with your CPU performing 97.8% faster.

Grafana Cloud users can reach out to their Grafana Labs Support team for the new table. To learn more, please check out our table panel documentation.

Grafana Assistant: a context-aware LLM agent

Grafana Assistant is a new LLM-powered agent in Grafana Cloud that helps you learn and solve problems in Grafana easier than ever. You can write in natural language to ask questions about observability, to be taken to see certain data, to make changes to your dashboards, and more.

You can read more about Assistant in this blog post and in our technical docs. And if you’re interested in giving it a try, you can sign up for the private preview today!

Grafana Drilldown updates

We’ve been hard at work expanding the capabilities of our Grafana Drilldown apps, which offer a queryless, point-and-click experience to quickly find insights in your observability data.

• Logs Drilldown now includes a number of enhanced visualization and filtering capabilities, including JSON visualization, support for multiple inclusion filters within your queries, and pagination for service selection. 
• Metrics Drilldown also includes new filtering capabilities to more precisely target the data you’re looking for, as well as UI improvements, like a collapsible sidebar. 
• Traces Drilldown (shown below) is now generally available, offering a refined, integrated solution for deep-dive trace analysis.
• Investigations, available in public preview, is a new feature that provides a central hub to correlate and analyze diverse signals across all of the Grafana Drilldown apps, leading to faster and more effective troubleshooting. 

You can learn more about our full suite of Grafana Drilldown apps in our technical documentation. 

Browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring 

k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are now generally available, allowing you to collect frontend web vitals, capture custom performance metrics, and simulate user actions like clicking buttons or completing forms. This powerful feature helps you gain an even deeper understanding of performance and availability from your end users’ point of view.

You can learn more about Synthetic Monitoring browser checks in this blog post, as well in our technical docs.

Prometheus native histograms

Native histograms, now in public preview, are a metric type in Prometheus that can produce, store, and query high-resolution histograms of observations. They usually offer higher resolution and more straightforward instrumentation than classic histograms.

Native histograms are also easier to instrument and you can use them to combine and manipulate histograms in queries and in Grafana. Plus, they provide compatibility with other formats, such as OpenTelemetry exponential histograms and Datadog distributions.

To learn more, please check out our in-depth blog post. 

New incident response features 

You now have more flexibility to tailor Grafana Cloud IRM to your team’s specific incident response workflows with new options, including:

• Custom incident statuses: Define additional phases, such as Investigating or Monitoring, to go beyond the default Active and Resolved statuses. 
• Custom metadata fields: Add custom fields, such as impacted services or involved teams.
• Private incidents: Limit visibility for sensitive incidents by declaring them privately.

To learn more, refer to our blog post, as well as our documentation on incident settings and private incidents. 

Segmentation in Adaptive Metrics

Adaptive Metrics is a metrics management and cardinality optimization feature in Grafana Cloud that eliminates unused and partially used metrics through aggregation. And now, through a new feature called Segmentation, you can have more granular control of Adaptive Metrics recommendations, managing them on a team, service, or system level.

You can define label-based segments via a GUI, API, or Terraform. Each segment will then receive its own recommendations, and rules and exemptions can then be managed per segment.

Grafana Cloud Traces updates

We have a few exciting updates related to Grafana Cloud Traces — the fully managed distributed tracing system powered by Grafana Tempo — to share this month. 

Trace correlations for faster troubleshooting 

Trace correlations let you configure custom, context-aware links straight into every span in the trace view. With a single click, you can now jump from a trace to:

• Logs filtered by the same trace or service fields
• Metrics focused on the exact service, endpoint, or error condition
• Profiles for CPU, memory, or heap snapshots tied to a span
• Dashboards, runbooks, tickets, or any external URL that enriches your workflow

All it takes is a quick rule in Correlations. Simply define which span or trace fields to use as variables, point to your target, and watch contextual links appear in the Explore trace view.

New features for TraceQL

We’re rolling out three big enhancements to TraceQL, giving you more flexibility and performance when querying traces in Grafana Cloud with Tempo. You can now:

• Rank your metrics with new topk(n) and bottomk(n) functions to quickly get your highest and lowest ranking time series.
• Aggregate spans over time using sum_over_time() for built-in cumulative sums, such as total bytes and error counts.
• Fetch the latest traces first via the experimental most_recent=true query hint.

To learn more, please visit our TraceQL docs. 

New Enterprise data source plugins

Lastly, here are a few of the Enterprise data source plugins we’ve recently rolled out for Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud:

• Netlify: Visualize data from Netlify, the platform for building, deploying, and scaling modern web applications, in your Grafana Cloud dashboards. You can view information related to all sites within your Netlify account, each of your builds, and more.
• Vercel: Analyze data from the cloud web development platform with queries including Access Groups, Aliases, Artifacts, Checks, Deployments, and Projects.
• Zendesk: Dig into data from Zendesk customer service and help desk systems.
• LogicMonitor: Easily view data from the cloud-based infrastructure monitoring and observability platform in your Grafana dashboards.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!