What's new in Grafana Cloud for September 2021: New panels, query caching, synthetic monitoring updates, and more

Grafana Cloud introduced several new features and updates in September 2021, enhancing user experience and data management capabilities. Noteworthy additions include new visualization options such as the Geomap and Annotations panels in Grafana 8.1, improved time series visualizations, and a "prettify JSON" option for easier log analysis. These updates are complemented by enhanced synthetic monitoring, customizable reporting, and query caching to reduce load times and costs. Users can also benefit from integrations with services like Kafka, Jenkins, and GitHub, allowing for quicker deployment of preconfigured dashboards. Additionally, enterprise-grade features have been expanded with the introduction of OAuth configurations and advanced reporting options. The expansion of Grafana Cloud to the EU region offers users the ability to select where their data is stored, while new commands for cortex-tools help optimize metric usage. These updates are designed to streamline data observation and enhance the overall efficiency of monitoring workflows on Grafana Cloud.