At Grafana Labs, we believe that effective alerting is the cornerstone of any robust observability strategy. That’s why we’re constantly listening to your feedback and working to improve the Grafana user experience so it’s easier for you to manage and interact with your alert rules. Today, we’ve excited to tell you about an update in Grafana Alerting that’s built to address some of your biggest pain points.

When your database stops accepting connections or your mail server becomes unreachable during business hours, the impact is immediate and costly. Fortunately, the right monitoring strategy can help you detect these TCP connection failures early on, and prevent them from impacting the user experience.

Your dashboard shows a latency spike. To investigate it, you copy the query, open logs in a new tab, paste and modify the query, lose your dashboard filters, and repeat for traces. By the time you find the issue, you have 15 tabs open. Starting today, you can click any panel and investigate right there. All your filters and variables carry over. No more tab juggling.

When multiple teams use Grafana, it can start to feel a bit messy. Dashboards pile up, permissions become unclear, and teams accidentally overwrite each other’s work. To help you and your organization stay clear, collaborative, and secure, we recommend putting all users in a single Grafana Cloud stack and managing access with teams, roles, and folders. To illustrate this, I’ll share a hypothetical example of how you can put this into practice across three teams. Let’s dive in!

A year ago, we hit a wall. Our Grafana OSS releases were excruciating to execute. The process was confusing and hard to follow, security patches were non-trivial, and many engineering hours were lost to an overly manual process. We needed to move fast, cut through ambiguity, and pull in just the right people without waiting on roadmaps or org charts.