In July 2021, Grafana Cloud introduced several new features and updates, enhancing its capabilities in observability and monitoring. Grafana Cloud Traces, built on the GA-released Grafana Tempo, allows users to integrate traces with metrics, logs, and dashboards, offering up to 50GB of trace analysis for free. The release of Grafana 8.0 brings improved data visualizations, live streaming, enhanced security, and real-time streaming capabilities for more responsive dashboard interactions. New integrations with services like Kubernetes, Docker, and JIRA aim to streamline the setup of tailored dashboards and alerting systems. Additionally, updated data source plugins, including Humio and Redis, enable visualization of existing data, while a revamped synthetic monitoring plugin offers a comprehensive view of system checks. Grafana Cloud plans to introduce a richer alert management interface in a future release, further aligning with the user-friendly experience of its platform.