Announcing Amazon Managed Grafana workspace version selection with version 9.4 support

Many customers that use Amazon Managed Grafana have requested for the ability to choose a Grafana version with the latest product features including navigation, dashboards, and visualizations. Today, we are announcing Amazon Managed Grafana workspace version selection with version 9.4 support.

Since the product was launched, Amazon Managed Grafana maintained a single version offering globally. With this release, you can select Amazon Managed Grafana version 9.4 or 8.4 during workspace creation. For instructions on configuring Amazon Managed Grafana workspaces with version 9.4, visit workspace configuration document. If you are an existing Amazon Managed Grafana customer and want to migrate workspace data sources, folders, and dashboards to version 9.4, you can use amazon-managed-grafana-migrator. Let us take a look at some version 9.4 features that would elevate your overall Amazon Managed Grafana experience.

New data source plugins and queries

Amazon Managed Grafana introduces several plugin enhancements with version 9.4, including but not limited to support Amazon OpenSearch serverless, Amazon CloudWatch cross-account querying, AWS IoT Sitewise multiple asset properties querying, Amazon Athena async querying and query result reuse. You can now use Explore to query different data sources for different queries, in addition to unifying data from multiple data sources in a single dashboard. To see a complete list of data sources supported by Amazon Managed Grafana, refer to the documentation here.

Prometheus and Loki data source query builder

With version 9.4, you will see a visual query builder interface within Explore that allows anyone to compose, edit, and understand what a query does. This new query builder allows you to search and select a metric through a multi-word search. Prometheus query builder allows you to choose between writing a PromQL query in text edit mode (Code) or visual builder mode (Builder). The Loki query editor helps you create log and metric queries that use Loki’s query language, LogQL.

New navigation

The navigation in Grafana has been updated with a new design and an improved structure to make it easier for you to access the data you need. With this update, you’ll be able to quickly navigate between features, giving you full visibility into the health of your systems.

Trace to metrics

With version 9.4, you will have the ability to correlate different signals by adding the functionality to link between traces and metrics. The trace to metrics feature lets you quickly see trends or aggregated data related to each span. You can navigate to Explore and query a trace. Each span will now have links to your queries.

Command palette enhancements

The command palette has been updated to provide a more efficient way to navigate Grafana. You can now search and access all pages and recent dashboards, making it easier to perform tasks without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Dashboard panel redesign

With the redesigned panels, you will have improved accessibility and ability to understand the status of a panel by adding and moving key elements. Version 9.4 has improved the support of panels without a header, made a distinction between details set by you and data-induced information, and then included all essential components in the header of the panel.

New data source connection page in Dashboards and Explore

When you are trying to create a dashboard, but don’t have a data source configured yet, you’ll see a page that guides you to set up a first connection. You also have an option to continue without setting up a data source and to use sample data instead.

Canvas panel

Canvas is a new panel that combines the power of Grafana with the flexibility of custom elements. Canvas visualizations are extensible form-built panels that allow you to explicitly place elements within static and dynamic layouts. This empowers you to design custom visualizations and overlay data in ways that aren’t possible with standard Grafana panels, all within Grafana’s UI.

Service account

You can use a service account to run automated workloads in Grafana, such as dashboard provisioning, configuration, or report generation. Service accounts will provide a secure and efficient way to perform operations on automated or triggered tasks within your Grafana instance. Service accounts resemble Grafana users and can be enabled/disabled, granted specific permissions, and remain active until they are deleted or disabled. You can grant granular permissions to service accounts by leveraging Grafana Teams.

Conclusion

To explore the complete list of new features in version 9.4, refer to the user documentation here. At this time of launch, version 9.4 is generally available in the following regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). To learn more about Amazon Managed Grafana features and its pricing, visit the product page and pricing page.

• Check out One Observability Workshop aimed at providing a hands-on experience for you on the wide variety of toolsets AWS offers to setup monitoring and observability on your applications.
• Refer to AWS Observability best practices to learn more about prescriptive guidance and recommendations with implementation examples.
• If you are a Terraform shop, check out AWS Observability accelerator for Terraform which is a set of Terraform modules to help you configure Observability for your workloads with AWS Observability services.

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