What's new in Cloud Observability?

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The Cloud Observability team makes frequent updates introduce new features, capabilities, and various improvements to the CloudObs App and Unified Data Platform. This article serves as a kind of repository for release notes, and is updated on a regular basis.

Recent Releases

Releases detailed on this page focus on improvements to the core Cloud Observability product, and select integrations. Improvements to other capabilities like our APIs, OpenTelemetry integrations, and the Unified Query Language are detailed on our docs site.

August 2023

Mousing over the drill down feature in a table chart Mousing over the drill down feature in a dependency diagram

New drill down tools for investigating performance from dependency diagrams from tables with drill down tools

• Expanded support for monitoring Azure health
  • Pre-built Azure monitoring dashboards available via "Add pre-built dashboard" button
  • (Early access documentation) New integrations for ingesting Azure metrics
    • Note: We are in the process of refining and moving this information to our docs site, where it will be available alongside our other metrics integrations.
• Export Unified Alerts as Terraform files from the UI
• New RBAC roles and project-scoped access controls

July 2023

A pre-built global service health dashboard is shown featuring various SLI and dependency charts, while a mouse hovers over a variable selector to filter the visualizations to a single service

Pre-built dashboards for monitoring service health A global service health dashboard is available which uses template variables to allow users to see performance metrics across all services, or filter to a specific service Individual service health dashboards can be generated from the "Add a pre-built dashboard" page Uses trace data for service SLIs, and metric data (as available) for underlying infrastructure health

• Updated Cloud Observability datasource plugin for Grafana
• High-efficiency span compression in OpenTelemetry Collectors
  • Cloud Observability is proud to support the new Apache Arrow-based compression available in the OpenTelemetry Collectors
  • This feature allows organizations to send very-high throughput span data to Cloud Observability using OTLP with a significant reduction in data egress volume, no Microsatellites required.
  • Contact your Cloud Observability account team to learn more
• Historical billing analysis for trace data
• Unified Dashboard navigation enhancements
  • Improved drop-down menus offer quick links to recent and starred dashboards
  • Reduced header footprint increases visualization density without clutter
  • New built-in sharing features copy dashboard links while retaining time windows

Q2 2023

The Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry available in the ServiceNow Store	Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry Now Generally Available, the SGC for OTel utilizes Cloud Observability to bring Cloud-native visibility and health insights into your CMDB Cloud-native CIs are automatically populated from trace and metric data offered through our OpenTelemetry Kubernetes Operator Enables ServiceNow Operations Workspace features including service and infrastructure relationships, inferred services, alert status, and service maps
A Unified Telemetry Dashboard shows many new chart types, including markdown panels, table views, and ordered lists - alongside previously-available line charts	New chart types Visualizations include tables, ordered lists, and markdown text Available in Unified Dashboards and Notebooks
A slide-over panel shows a new "Create a template variable" feature where users can add a template name, attribute key, and default attribute value in order to apply a variable to all queries on a given dashboard	Template variables Create and manage template variables in Unified Dashboards and Notebooks Utilize template variables in both the Unified Query Builder (UQB) and Query Language (UQL) Leverage template variables in Notebooks using one chart to investigate multiple scenarios
Correlation analysis feature compares SLI performance across baseline and deviation time windows, and highlights operations and attributes associated with cross-stack latency, throughput, and error rate changes	Enhanced correlation analysis New correlations highlight cross-stack attributes and operations associated with throughput, latency and error rate changes
The "New Alert" workflow in Cloud Observability offers templates to pre-populate a query window with a Composite alert condition. Additional templates include "Custom", "Change", "Anomaly", and "Outlier"	New alert templates Including support for composite, outlier, and anomaly alerts

• Historical billing analysis for metric data
• Embedded deployment markers in Unified Notebooks, Dashboards, and Alerts
• User-defined labels on dashboards and alerts

Q1 2023

Dashboard with a dependency diagram chart in the midst of being resized by a user	Flexible dashboard layouts Create, delete, expand and collapse sections within a dashboard Resize charts
A dependency diagram chart in Cloud Observability showing service-level dependency health and latency distribution	Custom dependency diagrams charts Generate service and operation dependency diagrams using trace data Filter underlying trace data to generate custom diagrams based on span attribution Limit graph sprawl based on immediate, upstream, and downstream dependencies Available in Unified Dashboards and Notebooks
The in-product "Create a pre-built dashboard" menu showing a few available AWS and OpenTelemetry dashboards	Pre-built metrics dashboards Quickly clone dashboards created our team to make use of the available metrics sources supported by Cloud Observability, including AWS and OpenTelemetry integrations.

• Whole-trace queries in Unified Notebooks and Dashboards
  • Supported visualizations include scatterplots
• View used metrics and metric cardinality in-product
• Export Unified Dashboards as Terraform files from the UI
• Templates for change-based alerts
• Block metrics at ingest based on customizable rules