Grafana Cloud updates: revamped Synthetic Monitoring, improvements to Kubernetes Monitoring, and more

Grafana Cloud has introduced a series of updates aimed at enhancing its observability platform, powered by the open-source Grafana LGTM Stack, which includes tools like Loki for logs and Grafana for visualization. The latest updates feature significant revamps to Synthetic Monitoring, now incorporating Grafana k6 for more comprehensive API and web application performance monitoring with MultiHTTP and k6 Scripted checks, which facilitate complex transaction testing without the need for extensive coding. Kubernetes Monitoring has also been improved with user experience enhancements such as customizable refresh intervals and Sift investigations for infrastructure telemetry. The platform now supports monitoring Velero and OpenLDAP through new integrations, and additional Kubernetes integrations for TensorFlow, OracleDB, Microsoft SQL Server, and Istio. Furthermore, Grafana SLO updates allow users to filter service level objectives by team and service, aiding in performance tracking, while the Alerting Provisioning HTTP API now enforces Role-Based Access Control for better security management. These updates are part of Grafana Cloud's ongoing efforts to provide a robust, fully managed observability platform with a generous free tier for new users.