Release notes for Grafana 8.1.0-beta2

Features and enhancements

• Alerting: Expand the value string in alert annotations and labels. #37051, @gerobinson
• Auth: Add Azure HTTP authentication middleware. #36932, @kostrse
• Auth: Auth: Pass user role when using the authentication proxy. #36729, @yuwaMSFT2
• Gazetteer: Update countries.json file to allow for linking to 3-letter country codes. #37129, @bryanuribe

Bug fixes

• Config: Fix Docker builds by correcting formatting in sample.ini. #37106, @FZambia
• Explore: Fix encoding of internal URLs. #36919, @aocenas