Grafana Release Notes

Welcome to Grafana 12.0! We have a lot to share. This release marks general availability for Grafana Drilldown (previously Explore Metrics, Logs, and Traces), Grafana-managed alerts and recording rules, Cloud migration, and plugin management tooling. You can also try new preview and experimental tools: Sync your dashboards directly to a GitHub repository with Git Sync, and try our new Terraform provider and CLI. Add tabs, new layouts and conditional logic to your dashboards, and load tables and geomaps far faster. Join and transform data limitlessly from multiple sources with SQL Expressions. In Grafana Cloud and Enterprise, sync your users and teams instantly from your SAML identity provider using SCIM (the System for Cross-Domain Identity Management). Lastly, don’t forget to try on one of several new color themes for the user interface.

Read on to learn about these and more improvements to Grafana!

For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog. For the specific steps we recommend when you upgrade to v12.0, check out our Upgrade Guide.

Breaking changes in Grafana v12.0

For Grafana v12.0, we’ve also provided a list of breaking changes to help you upgrade with greater confidence. For our purposes, a breaking change is any change that requires users or operators to do something. This includes:

• Changes in one part of the system that could cause other components to fail
• Deprecations or removal of a feature
• Changes to an API that could break automation
• Changes that affect some plugins or functions of Grafana
• Migrations that can’t be rolled back

For each change, the provided information:

• Helps you determine if you’re affected
• Describes the change or relevant background information
• Guides you in how to mitigate for the change or migrate
• Provides more learning resources

Original source

Dashboards and visualizations

Canvas one-click data links and actions

Last year we introduced one-click data links and actions for canvas visualizations in public preview and experimentally respectively. With the One click switch toggled on, it takes just a single click to open a data link or trigger an action. Now, both of these features are generally available for the canvas visualization.

One-click data links in visualizations

You can now configure data links to be accessed with a single click. We’ve added the One click switch to data links for the following visualizations:

Visualization actions are now GA

Actions for visualizations are now generally available. With actions, you can trigger basic, unauthenticated API calls from a dashboard panel. Previously experimental, actions are now generally available for the following visualizations:

New Actions cell type for table visualizations

The table visualization now includes a new Actions cell type, which lets you trigger actions directly from table cells. This enhancement allows you to define custom actions, such as triggering external workflows, from within a table column:

Better time region control in Annotations with Cron syntax

Using Cron syntax, you can define more granular schedules than previously possible with just weekday and time selections. For example, it is now possible to create a single time region query that marks periods like “At 21:00 on the second Tuesday of every other month” or “Weekdays 9-5.” To try it out create an Annotation, toggle the Advanced switch and use Cron syntax to set more granular time region controls.

Improved performance in geomap visualizations

We’ve moved over to WebGL for geomap marker layers. You can expect a significant increase in performance and stability, which is especially noticeable for larger datasets.

Dashboard variables supported for all transformations

In previous releases, we added support for dashboard variables to a small number of transformations. Now this functionality has been added to all transformations, where applicable. All text input fields in transformations accept variable syntax.

Alerting

Alert rule version history

Grafana Managed Alerts now supports version history. You can view, compare, and restore your alert’s historical versions by navigating to the alert details view of any Grafana Managed Alert rule and clicking the Version tab.

Data sources

LBAC for data sources - metrics

It can be hard for teams to collaborate on dashboards when they have to use different data sources. Grafana instances can become cluttered and confusing with hundreds of data sources.

Plugins

Plugin details links improvements

We’re pleased to announce an improvement to the Grafana plugin catalog that benefits both Grafana users and plugin developers. By introducing standardized links on plugin details pages, we’re making it easier for users to engage with developers, and find the essential information they need to get the most out of a plugin. Developers, in turn, will gain valuable feedback and support from their audience.

Security

API keys fully deprecated and automatically migrated to Service Accounts

We’ve fully deprecated API keys in Grafana, and all existing API keys have been automatically migrated to Service Accounts. No action is needed on your part—your API integrations will continue to work seamlessly while benefiting from improved security and management features.

Original source

Welcome to Grafana 11.5! Read on to learn about new sharing, reporting, and export options, cross-cluster search for Elasticsearch, PDC support for several new data sources, and more. The Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant is in public preview and now supports all plugins and Grafana Alerts, in addition to dashboards, folders, and data sources. We’ve also made it more secure to run third-party apps and data sources, and improved user session handling for OAuth 2.0 and SAML.

For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog. For the specific steps we recommend when you upgrade to v11.5, check out our Upgrade Guide.

Cloud Migration Assistant

Migrate your dashboards, data sources, folders, plugins, and alerts to Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud
Available in public preview
Open source
Enterprise
Available in public preview
Dashboards and visualizations
Data sources
Plugins
Alerting

Migrate your Grafana OSS/Enterprise instance to Grafana Cloud in just a few clicks. The Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant launched in Grafana 11.2 with initial support for dashboards, data sources, and folders. We’re excited to announce support for plugins and Grafana alerts.

Dashboards and visualizations

Redesigned filters for dashboards

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Open source
Available in public preview
Dashboards and visualizations

We’ve redesigned dashboard filters for an improved filter creation experience! The redesigned filters are more prominent in the dashboard and filters based on the same ad hoc filter variable are more clearly related. In the new design, you can click anywhere in the filter field to begin creating a one and Grafana automatically detects which part of the filter you’re setting up. It takes fewer clicks to create a filter and the creation process using keyboard strokes is smoother than previously.

New regular expression option for Extract fields transformation

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Open source
Enterprise
Generally Available
Dashboards and visualizations

We’ve updated the Extract fields transformation with an additional RegExp format option you can use to perform more advanced parsing of the selected field, such as extracting parts of strings or splitting content into multiple fields using named capturing groups like /(?.*)/.

Redesigned sharing experience in Dashboards

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Open source
Enterprise
Generally Available
Dashboards and visualizations

Introducing a redesigned sharing experience in Dashboards! The redesigned sharing model is leaner, easier to navigate, and more focused on what you want to do.

Customizable shareable dashboard panel images

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Open source
Enterprise
Generally Available
Dashboards and visualizations

We’ve made some big changes to the panel image sharing experience. When you share a panel link, there’s a new Panel preview section where you can:

Reporting

Reporting theme options

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Enterprise
Generally Available
Dashboards and visualizations

Choose the light or dark theme for PDF attachments and embedded dashboard images in Reports. The selected theme options are applied to PDFs and embedded images for all reports within your organization.

PDF export improvements in GA

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Enterprise
Generally Available
Dashboards and visualizations

In May 2024, we announced a new way of generating PDFs that introduced a major performance improvement for the PDF export feature. It also fixed all caveats related to rendering a report with panels or rows set to repeat by a variable, like rendering repeating panels inside collapsed rows.

Alerting

RBAC for alerting notifications

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Open source
Enterprise
Generally Available
Alerting

The feature flag alertingApiServer is now enabled by default. In the UI, administrators have more granular control over which parts of notification settings users have access to.

RBAC for notification policies

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Open source
Enterprise
Generally Available
Alerting

Manage notification policies through Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Choose who can create, edit, and read notification policies using fixed roles. You can only grant different access levels to the entire notification policy tree; not to individual notification policies.

Data sources

Elasticsearch cross-cluster search

Grafana Cloud
Available in public preview
Open source
Enterprise
Available in public preview
Data sources

The Elasticsearch data source plugin now offers support for Elasticsearch’s Cross-cluster Search feature. If you’re a big Elasticsearch user, you might have multiple clusters set up for geographical separation, different teams or departments, compliance, or scaling reasons. Previously, you needed to set up a separate data source in Grafana for each cluster. Now with cross-cluster search, you can query data across all these clusters from a single Grafana data source. This makes it simpler and more convenient to query all of your Elasticsearch logs. You can learn more about this feature in the Elasticsearch docs.

Private Data Source Connect (PDC) Support for AWS Data Sources

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Open source
Enterprise
Generally Available
Data sources

Private Data Source Connect (PDC) is now supported across more AWS data source plugins - including:

• AWS Athena (Version 2.19.0)
• AWS Aurora (Version 0.4.0)
• OpenSearch (Version 2.21.0)
• AWS Redshift (Version 1.20.0)
• AWS X-Ray (Version 2.13.0)

With PDC, you can establish a private, secured connection between a Grafana Cloud instance, or stack, and data sources secured within a private network. Take advantage of the convenience and power of Grafana Cloud - even if your cluster is hosted in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or another private network. Find the full list of supported data source plugins here.

Time series macro support in visual query builder for SQL data sources

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Open source
Enterprise
Experimental
Data sources

It is now possible to create time series queries from the query builder in the following data sources. MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL. Use the Data operations drop-down to select a macro like $__timeGroup or $__timeGroupAlias.

Authentication and authorization

OAuth and SAML session handling improvements

Grafana Cloud
Available in public preview
Open source
Enterprise
Available in public preview
Authentication and authorization

We’ve improved how Grafana manages external sessions for OAuth and SAML, enhancing compatibility with identity providers that support session management. Grafana can now reliably manage SAML external sessions (Identity Provider sessions) by using the SessionIndex attribute in the SAML assertion and the NameID attribute in the logout request. Previously, Grafana relied on the Login attribute as the NameID and did not include the SessionIndex in the logout request, which could result in users being logged out of all their applications/IdP sessions when logging out of Grafana.

Plugins

Plugin Frontend Sandbox

Grafana Cloud
Available in private preview
Open source
Enterprise
Available in private preview
Plugins
Security

The Plugin Frontend Sandbox is a security feature that isolates plugin frontend code from the main Grafana application. When enabled, plugins run in a separate JavaScript context, which provides several security benefits:

Public dashboards are now Shared dashboards

Grafana Cloud
Generally Available
Open source
Enterprise
Generally Available

We’ve renamed the Public dashboards feature, Shared dashboards. This renaming is part of our overall redesign of dashboard sharing and aims to better align externally shared dashboards with other dashboard sharing options.

Original source

Welcome to Grafana 11.4! This is a special release with one new feature, created in partnership with AWS. We’ve made improvements to Cloudwatch so you can query your logs using two additional query languages: Opensearch PPL and Opensearch SQL. We’ve also updated the querying experience by providing a sample of commonly-used queries, syntax highlighting in the query editor, and auto-completion suggestions for complex queries. Read on to learn more about this new feature.

For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog. For the specific steps we recommend when you upgrade to v11.4, check out our Upgrade Guide.

Query Cloudwatch Logs Insights with PPL and SQL

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The AWS CloudWatch data source plugin now offers two new query languages for searching through logs: OpenSearch PPL and OpenSearch SQL. You now have increased flexibility to choose a more familiar query language and to take advantage of their unique features (like the SQL JOIN command) when querying AWS CloudWatch Logs Insights. In addition to the already supported Logs Insights QL option, you can find the added query language options in the new Query language drop-down list.

We’ve also updated the query editor to support syntax highlighting and to provide suggestions while you type, which simplifies writing complex queries. When you select log groups, the suggestions also include discovered fields.

Not sure where to start? We’ve also updated our CloudWatch Logs cheat sheet with the most commonly used queries so you can paste and customize to fit exactly what you need. Clicking on any of the example queries prefills the query input field.

For the complete list of commands supported for OpenSearch PPL and SQL, refer to the Cloudwatch Logs Insights documentation.

Original source

Welcome to Grafana 11.3!

Scenes-powered dashboards are now generally available and the Explore Logs plugin is now installed by default. The dashboard experience has also improved in other ways including the ability to trigger API calls from any canvas element with the new Actions option and an update to transformations so you can apply calculations to dynamic fields. We’ve also simplified the alert setup experience, added customizable announcement banners that admins can send to all users, and improved some default permissions.

For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog. For the specific steps we recommend when you upgrade to v11.3, check out our Upgrade Guide.

Scenes-powered Dashboards are generally available

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

For the past few months we’ve been working on a major update of our Dashboards architecture and migrated it to the Scenes library. This migration provides us with more stable, dynamic, and flexible dashboards as well as setting the foundation for what we envision the future of Grafana dashboards will be. Here are four of the improvements that are being introduced as part of this work:

View mode and Edit mode

It can be difficult to efficiently navigate through the visually cluttered options during the dashboard editing process. When in View mode, the dashboard screen is less clutteed. In Edit mode, options like adding a panel and changing settings are easier to access.

Template variables and the time range picker remain visible as your scroll

The time picker is now the dashboard canvas rather than the toolbar, and now, together with template variables, it will stick to the top as you scroll through your dashboard. This is a highly requested feature that we’re very happy to be able to roll out!

Timezone parameter in Grafana URL

We’ve added a new time zone URL parameter, tz. This allows sharing dashboards with a selected time zone, ensuring that the receiver views it in the intended time zone regardless of their local settings.

Kiosk mode displays dashboard controls

When playing a playlist or displaying a dashboard in full screen, you can see controls by default. These controls include the time range picker, refresh button, variables, annotations, and links.

If you prefer to hide these controls during playlist playback, new configuration options are available when starting a playlist. You can choose which controls to display while the playlist is running.

For configuring controls outside of playlist playback, you can use the following URL parameters:

• _dash.hideTimePicker: Hides the time and refresh picker
• _dash.hideVariables: Hides variables and annotations controls
• _dash.hideLinks: Hides dashboard links

Known limitations

• The variable usage check is not yet available.
• Editing a panel:
  • The Library panels tab is not available anymore. You can replace a library panel from the panel menu.
  • The Overrides tab is not in panel options (coming in Grafana v11.3.0). Overrides are shown at the bottom of the option list.
  • The drop-down menu to collapse the visualization picker is missing (coming in Grafana v11.3.0).
• The Share button is not visible when edit mode is enabled (coming in Grafana v11.3.0).

If you want to learn more, in detail, about all the improvements we’ve made, don’t miss our blog post.

Additional dashboard and visualization improvements

Auto-formatted table cell values in Cell Inspect

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve improved the inspect value experience in table visualizations with the addition of tabs in the Inspect value drawer: Plain text and Code editor.

When the Cell inspect value switch is toggled on, clicking the inspect icon in a cell opens the drawer. Grafana attempts to automatically detect the type of data in the cell and opens the drawer with the associated tab showing. However, you can switch back and forth between tabs.

Canvas actions

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

We’ve updated canvas visualizations so that now you can add actions to canvas elements, like opening an issue in GitHub or calling any API. The Selected element configuration now includes a Data links and actions section where you can add actions to elements. Each action can be configured to call an API endpoint.

Actions can also be configured to be triggered with a single click. To enable this functionality, select Action under the one One-click section in the Selected element data links and actions option. If there are multiple actions for an element, the first action in the list has the one-click functionality.

Also, we’ve also added the ability to control the order in which actions are displayed in the tooltip by dragging and dropping them.

To try out this feature, enable the vizActions feature toggle.

Legend support in bar gauge visualizations

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve added legend support to bar gauge visualizations. This is part an effort to standardize legends and make them available across more panels. You can customize legends by navigating to the Legend section in panel options. By default, the legend is disabled.

You can also hide names in each bar gauge, since they are redundant to the legend. To do that, in the Name placement option, choose Hidden.

Apply the same binary transformation to all the number fields in a given table at once

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

When you set up a binary operation using the Add field from calculation transformation (for example, dividing each column by a certain value), there’s a new All number fields option available to select. Use this to apply a mathematical operator to multiple number fields simultaneously. This feature is particularly useful when you’re scaling or offsetting data containing multiple, dynamically-named fields, allowing the transformation to be applied when dealing with unknown field names.

Actions for visualizations

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

We’ve updated several visualizations so that now you can add actions to them. The panel configuration now includes a Data links and actions section where you can add actions that can each be configured to call an API endpoint.

Also, we’ve also added the ability to control the order in which actions are displayed in the tooltip by dragging and dropping them.

This functionality has been added for the following visualizations:

• Bar chart
• Candlestick
• Heatmap
• State timeline
• Status history
• Time series
• Trend
• XY chart

To try out this feature, enable the vizActions feature toggle.

Explore Logs

The Explore Logs plugin is installed by default

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

With Explore Logs you can visualize and explore your logs to troubleshoot without having to write queries. It is easy to find spikes in your log volume, filter your logs and pinpoint problematic log lines.

While Explore Logs is GA in cloud and installed there by default already, with Grafana v11.3.0 it will be automatically installed on your Open Source or Enterprise instance as well. This will let you use Explore Logs alongside Explore Metrics without needing to install it manually.

This is configured by the preinstall configuration parameter in your Grafana configuration. For more information about Explore logs, refer to the documentation.

Correlations

Add correlations to external URLs in Explore

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Correlations is a feature that allows Grafana users to set up links between their data sources. Previously, the link generated would only be from one query to another—meaning results from a query could only generate links to open a second Explore pane with other query results.

With this feature, users can now link to third party web-based software based on their search results. The format follows the standard Grafana format for using variables.

Alerting

Simplified query section for alert rule creation

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Use a simplified version of the query and alert conditions step to create Grafana-managed alert rules. The default options streamline rule creation with a cleaner header and a single query and condition. For more complex rules, switch to advanced options to add multiple queries and expressions.

This feature is rolling out to Grafana Cloud over the next couple of weeks.

Grafana Enterprise and OSS:

To use this feature, enable the alertingQueryAndExpressionsStepMode feature toggle.

Role-based access control for notifications in Alerting

Available in public preview in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

Manage contact points, mute timings, and notification templates through Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Choose who can create, edit, and read contact points, mute timings, and notification templates using permissions or fixed roles.

For mute timings and notification templates, you can grant all users all permissions or no permissions. For contact points, you can extend or limit permissions to individual contact points.

Recording rules for Grafana-managed alerts

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Create recording rules for Grafana-managed alert rules to calculate frequently needed expressions or computationally expensive expressions in advance and save the result as a new set of time series. Querying this new time series is faster, especially for dashboards since they query the same expression every time the dashboards refresh. Previously, this was only available for data-source managed alert rules.

In Grafana OSS and Enterprise, you can create both Grafana-managed and data source-managed recording rules if you enable the grafanaManagedRecordingRules feature flag.

Data sources

GitHub App authentication for the GitHub data source

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Authenticate the GitHub data source using a GitHub App, an alternative to personal access tokens (PATs). GitHub App authentication offers enhanced security by granting more granular permissions, reducing the risk of over-permissioning.

For more information, refer to the GitHub data source documentation for detailed instructions on setting up GitHub App authentication.

Announcement banner

Available in public preview in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

Grafana admins struggle to effectively communicate important updates and maintenance information to their users through traditional channels like email and Slack. Now you can display customizable banners within the Grafana interface to ensure critical information is visible and timely. This ensures that all users are immediately informed of important updates, maintenance schedules, compliance info, or other crucial messages, reducing the likelihood of missed communications and enhancing overall user awareness and engagement.

By default, only organization administrators can create announcement banners. You can customize who can create announcement banners with Role-based access control.

To use the Announcement banner in self-managed Grafana, turn on the notificationBanner feature toggle in Grafana v11.3 or newer and navigate in your Grafana instance to Admin > General > Announcement Banner.

Improved subfolder creation flow

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You can now create subfolders within folders where you have Edit or Admin rights without needing any additional permissions. This enables users and teams to fully manage their folder and dashboard hierarchy, and allows you to keep your instance secure by granting users the minimum necessary set of permissions.

Plugins

Plugin details page redesign

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

To help make it easier for administrators to assess and interact with Grafana plugins, we are reworking the plugin details page to highlight important metadata, such as when the plugin was last updated.

We intend to further extend this new layout with consistent links for all plugins, to complement the custom links which can currently be optionally configured. This improved consistency will enable simpler interaction with a plugin’s developer - whether that is Grafana Labs, our commercial partners, or our community. These links will include actions such as raising feature requests or bug reports, as well as allowing our community developers to indicate available support and sponsorship options for those that depend on their work.

Authentication and authorization

Configure LDAP through the UI

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

Use the new UI to set up your LDAP server as an Identity Provider, to smooth out the setup process and get quick confirmation that it works properly.

The new user interface makes it much clearer what each option does, and setting up the various configurations is now more transparent. Also, you no longer need to restart the Grafana instance for the new settings to take effect.

To use LDAP in the UI, enable the feature toggle ssoSettingsLDAP.

Developers: Support RBAC in Plugins

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’re excited to announce that plugins can now leverage Grafana’s role based access control to define their own roles and permissions in order to control access to their routes.

To define roles and their default assignments, plugin developers need to add a roles section to their plugin.json file. Grafana will automatically register these roles and assign them to the corresponding basic roles: Viewer, Editor, Admin, and Grafana Admin.

Protecting includes and routes is also straight forward, and can be done through the new action and reqAction field of these sections of the plugin.json file.

Plugin example

If you’d like to test this and explore RBAC for plugins further, refer to this plugin example for guidance.

Known limitation

Plugins permissions are currently restricted to actions without scopes.

Original source

Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant is in public preview

Available in public preview in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise

Migrating from OSS or Enterprise Grafana to Grafana Cloud has traditionally been complex, requiring technical knowledge of Grafana’s HTTP API and time-consuming manual processes. The new Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant changes this by providing a user-friendly interface that automates the migration of your resources. No coding required, it securely handles the transfer in just a few easy steps.

This intuitive UI offers real-time updates on your migration status, making your migration journey faster, more efficient, and less error-prone. Initially, the Cloud Migration Assistant supports dashboards, folders, and core data sources, with plans to include alerting, app plugins, and panel plugins in future updates.

Ready to make the move? Explore our migration guide to learn more about the Cloud Migration Assistant today and begin your effortless transition to Grafana Cloud.

Navigation bookmarks

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

As Grafana keeps growing, we have had feedback that it can be hard to find the pages you are looking for in the navigation. That is why we have added a new section to the navigation called ‘Bookmarks’, so you can easily access all of your favourite pages at the top of the navigation.

This feature is being rolled out across Grafana Cloud now. To use Bookmarks in self-managed Grafana, turn on the pinNavItems feature toggle in Grafana v11.2 or newer.

Dashboards and visualizations

Transformation updates

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve made a number of exciting updates to transformations!

You can now use variables in some transformations

Template variables are now supported for the Limit, Sort by, Filter data by values, Grouping to matrix (a community contribution ⭐️), Heatmap, and Histogram transformations. This enables dynamic transformation configurations based on panel data and dashboard variables.

New transpose transformation

We’re excited to announce the new Transpose transformation, which allows you to pivot the data frame, converting rows into columns and columns into rows. This feature is particularly useful for data sources that don’t support pivot queries, enabling more flexible and insightful data visualizations.

For more information, refer to the documentation.

This feature is a community contribution ❤️

Group to nested tables is now generally available

We’re excited to announce that the Group to nested tables transformation is now generally available! Easily group your table data by specified fields and perform calculations on each group. With this transformation, you can enhance the depth and utility of your table visualizations.

See the documentation for more information.

Format string is now generally available

The Format string transformation is now generally available! Use this transformation to customize the output of a string field. From formatting your string data to upper, lower, title case, and more, this transformation provides a convenient way to standardize and tailor the presentation of string data for better visualization and analysis. See the documentation for more information.

New cumulative and window calculations available in Add field from calculation

The Add field from calculation transformation now supports both cumulative and window calculations. The cumulative function calculates on the current row and all preceding rows. You can calculate the total or the mean of your data up to and including the current row. With the window function you can calculate the mean, standard deviation, or variance on a specified set (window) of your data. The window can either be trailing or centered. With a trailing window the current row will be the last row in the window. With a centered window the window will be centered on the current row.

See the documentation for more information.

Improvements in canvas visualizations

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Standardized tooltips

As a continuation of our efforts to standardize tooltips across visualizations, we’ve updated canvas visualization tooltips to be supported for all elements tied to data. Besides the element name and data, the tooltip now also displays the timestamp. This is a step forward from the previous implementation where tooltips were shown only if data links were configured.

Data links improvements

We’ve updated canvas visualizations so that you can add data links to canvas elements without using an override. The Selected element configuration now includes a Data links section where you can add data links to elements using the same steps as in other visualizations.

Data links in canvas elements can also be configured to open with a single click. To enable this functionality, select Link under the one One-click section in the Selected element data link options. If there are multiple data links for an element, the first link in the list has the one-click functionality.

As part of this improvement, we’ve also added the ability to control the order in which data links are displayed by dragging and dropping them. This improvement has been added to all visualizations.

In future releases, we’ll add one-click functionality to data links in other Grafana visualizations.

State timeline supports pagination

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The state timeline visualization now supports pagination. The Page size option lets you paginate the state timeline visualization to limit how many series are visible at once. This is useful when you have many series. Previously, all the series in a state timeline were made to fit within the single window of the panel, which could make it hard to read.

With paginated results, the visualization displays a subset of all series on each page.

Pagination is especially useful if you’re running a query on a dynamic data source. It’s also helpful regardless of whether you have many data frames with just two fields (time + value) or few frames with many fields (time + many values).

This feature is a community contribution ❤️

Alerting

Centralized alert history page

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

View a history of all alert events generated by your Grafana-managed alert rules from one centralized page. This helps you see patterns in your alerts over time, observe trends, make predictions, and even debug alerts that might be firing too often.

An alert event is displayed each time an alert instance changes its state over a period of time. All alert events are displayed regardless of whether silences or mute timings are set, so you’ll see a complete set of your data history even if you’re not necessarily being notified.

For Grafana Enterprise and OSS users:

To try out the new alert history page, enable the alertingCentralAlertHistory feature toggle and configure Loki annotations.

Explore

Logs filtering and pinning in Explore content outline

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Grafana Explore now allows for logs filtering and pinning in content outline.

Filtering Logs: All log levels are now automatically available in the content outline. You can filter by log level, currently supported for Elasticsearch and Loki data sources. To select multiple filters, hold down the command key on Mac or the control key on Windows while clicking.

Pinning Logs: The new pinning feature allows users to pin logs to the content outline, making them easily accessible for quick reference during investigations. To pin a log, hover over a log in the logs panel and click on the Pin to content outline icon in the log row menu. Clicking on a pinned log will open the log context modal, showing the log highlighted in context with other logs. From here, you can also open the log in split mode to preserve the time range in the left pane while having the time range specific to that log in the right pane.

Forward direction search for Loki

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Explore now supports forward direction search for Loki logs searches. This allows users to seamlessly browse logs in a time range in forward chronological order (for example, tracing a specific user’s actions using logs).

To use this feature, select Forward for the Direction option. Note that in the screenshot above, logs are rendered beginning from the starting time period of the query, not the end.

Data sources

Cloudwatch Metric Insights cross account observability support

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We are excited to announce support for cross-account querying in Metric Insights query builder for AWS Cloudwatch Plugin. This enables building SQL queries to monitor across multiple accounts in the same region in AWS Cloudwatch.

This feature introduces an account drop-down for selecting one or all of your source accounts and builds a query that targets them. Furthermore, results can be grouped by account ID by selecting Account ID in the Group By drop-down.

For more complex queries that are not covered by the options in the builder you can switch to the manual Code editor and edit the query.

To set up cross-account querying for AWS Cloudwatch Plugin, see instructions here.

Zendesk data source for Grafana

Available in public preview in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

We are excited to announce the release of a new Zendesk data source for Grafana. This addition extends Grafana’s capabilities, enabling seamless integration with Zendesk.

You can find out more about the data source in the Zendesk data source documentation.

Catchpoint Enterprise data source for Grafana

Available in public preview in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

Introducing Catchpoint data source plugin.

The Catchpoint data source plugin allows you to query and visualize Tests, RUM, and SLO data from within Grafana.

Yugabyte data source for Grafana

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

We are excited to announce the release of a new data source for Grafana: Yugabyte. This addition extends Grafana’s capabilities, enabling seamless integration with YugabyteDB.

You can find out more about the data source in the Yugabyte data source documentation.

The datasource has some known limitations: ad-hoc filters and TLS/network customization are not yet supported. Improvements and additional supported features are planned for future updates.

Authentication and authorization

Map org-specific user roles from your OAuth provider

Generally available in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise

Assign users to particular organizations with a specific role in Grafana, depending on an attribute value obtained from your identity provider.

This is a longstanding feature request from the community. We collaborated with our community to implement the request and have added this capability in Grafana 11.2.0.

For Generic OAuth and Okta, you can configure the claim (using the org_attribute_path setting) that contains the organizations which the user belongs to. Other OAuth providers use the same attribute for organization mapping that is used for group mapping: Entra ID (previously Azure AD), GitLab and Google use the current user’s Groups, and GitHub uses the user’s Teams.

To configure organization mapping for your instance, please check the documentation for the OAuth provider you are using in the Grafana documentation. You can find an example of how to configure organization mapping on each OAuth provider page under the Org roles mapping example section.

Better SAML integration for Azure AD

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

When setting up Grafana with Azure AD using the SAML protocol, the Azure AD Graph API sometimes returns a follow-up Graph API call rather than the information itself. This is the case for users who belong to more than 150 groups when using SAML.

With Grafana 11.2, we offer a mechanism for setting up an application as a Service Account in Azure AD and retrieving information from Graph API.

Please refer to our documentation on how to set up an Azure AD registered application for this setup.

API support for LDAP configuration

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

The SSO settings API has been updated to include support for LDAP settings. This feature is experimental behind the feature flag ssoSettingsLDAP.

You will soon be able to configure LDAP from the UI and Terraform.

Reduce number of required fields from the SAML form

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced

The private key and certificate fields are no longer mandatory in the SAML form. To configure SAML without providing a private key and a certificate you have to opt out from using signed requests.

Generate SAML certificate and private key

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud Pro

You can generate a new certificate and private key for SAML directly from the UI form. Click on the Generate key and certificate button from the Sign requests tab in the SAML form and then fill in the information you want to be embedded in your generated certificate.

OpenID Connect Discovery URL for Generic OAuth

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The OpenID Connect Discovery URL is available in the Generic OAuth form. The info extracted from this URL will be used to populate the Auth URL, Token URL and API URL fields.

Original source

Welcome to Grafana 11.1! This release contains some minor improvements following on the big announcements in Grafana 11.0. We’ve adding cell text wrapping to table visualizations, a much-requested feature. We’ve also redesigned the Alerting settings page and made it possible to manage access to Silences using role-based access control (RBAC). A number of accessibility improvements are included in this release, making Grafana easier to use for everyone. And lastly, the XY chart is now generally available.

For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog. For the specific steps we recommend when you upgrade to v11.1, check out our Upgrade Guide.

Dashboards and visualizations

Visualization ease of use improvements

We’ve made a number of small improvements to the data visualization experience in Grafana.

Table cell text wrapping

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

A longstanding feature request for the table visualization is to allow wrapping of text within cells. In Grafana 11.1 we’ve added this capability! By default, the column with the longest text is selected for wrapping. You can also configure wrapping manually using field overrides.

Learn more about the table panel in our table panel documentation.

NOTE

Text wrapping is in public preview, however, it’s available to use by default. We’d love hear from you about how this new feature is working. To provide feedback, you can open an issue in the Grafana GitHub repository.

Stat visualization percent change color mode options

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Sometimes less is more! The Standard behavior for percent change in the stat visualization is to color positive percent changes green and negative percent changes red. Depending on your use case however, you may want to customize how percent change color is set. We’ve added the options to have percent change color mode Inverted (with positive red and negative green) or match the Same as value.

XY chart is GA

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’re promoting XY chart out of public preview and into general availability.

XY charts provide a way to visualize arbitrary x and y values in a graph so that you can easily show the relationship between two variables. XY charts are typically used to create scatter plots. You can also use them to create bubble charts where field values determine the size of each bubble:

Over the past several months we’ve introduced multiple enhancements to the visualizations like auto mode, which now handles most scenarios that previously required manual configuration. Additionally, we’ve added better control over point styling and further improved performance. We’re excited to include XY chart as a first class citizen in the core Grafana visualization library. To learn more about the panel, refer to the documentation.

To use the new XY chart visualization, you must first enable the autoMigrateXYChartPanel feature toggle.

Alerting

Re-designed settings page for Alerting

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The new settings page provides you with a holistic view of where Grafana-managed alert instances are forwarded.

• Manage which Alertmanagers receive alert instances from Grafana-managed rules without navigating and editing data sources.
• Manage version snapshots for the built-in Alertmanager, which allows administrators to roll back unintentional changes or mistakes in the Alertmanager configuration.
• There is also a visual diff that compares the historical snapshot with the latest configuration to see which changes were made.

Learn more in the Alertmanager configuration documentation.

Alerting template selector

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Enables you to easily choose which templates you want to use in your alert notification messages by adding a template selector in the Contact Points form.

Select from existing templates or enter a custom one for your specific needs. You can switch between the two tabs to access the list of available templates and copy them across to the customized version.

Learn more in the documentation.

Add OAuth2 to HTTP settings for vanilla Alertmanager / Mimir

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Configure OAuth2 authentication for any Alertmanager or Mimir receiver (called Contact Points in Grafana) through the user interface. Learn more about alerting contact points in supported contact point integrations and find the reference for Oauth2 fields in the Prometheus Alertmanager docs for Oauth2.

Note that OAuth2 is not yet implemented for the Grafana built-in Alertmanager.

Improved paused alert visibility

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Pause and resume alert rule evaluation directly from the Alert rules list and details view. This helps Improve visibility of when alert rules have been paused by displaying “Paused” as the alert rule state.

Learn more in the alert rules documentation.

Removes requirement of datasources:query permission for reading rules

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Cloud

Fetching a rule group no longer requires the datasources:query permission for every data source used by the rules within that group. Now, the only requirements are alert.rules:read and folders:read for the folder the group is contained in.

Note: datasources:query is still required to preview an alert rule, regardless of alert rules and folders permissions.

Learn more in the RBAC configuration documentation.

Rule-specific silences with permissions

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

More easily create silences directly from the Alert rule list view or detail page.

These rule-specific silences are guaranteed to only apply to a single rule and permissions to read, create, update or delete are tied to a user’s permissions for that rule.

Rule-specific silences with RBAC

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Cloud

Manage silences through Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). In addition to the Grafana open source functionality in Rule-specific silences with permissions, you can choose who can create, edit, and read silences using the following permissions:

• Users with the alert.silences:create permission, scoped within a folder, are able to create silences for rules contained within that folder and its subfolders
• Users with the alert.silences:read permission, scoped within a folder, are able to read silences for rules contained within that folder and its subfolders, and general silences
• Users with the alert.silences:write permission, scoped within a folder, are able to expire and recreate silences for rules contained within that folder and its subfolders

Learn more about managing access using roles.

Support for AWS SNS integration in Grafana-managed alerts

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Send alerts notifications to AWS simple notifications service.

Recent accessibility improvements

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

GeoMap keyboard support

The GeoMap panel can now be used with a keyboard! Focus the map area, move around with the arrows keys and zoom in and out using + and -.

Panel shortcut keyboard support

We have panel shortcuts, which previously only worked on whichever panel you hovered over. It now also takes into account the keyboard focus.

Heading improvements

The majority of screen reader users find things on a web page using headings. Recently, we have added missing headings and corrected heading levels in some places, most notably panel titles.

Reduced motion support

Users who are affected by a lot of animations on a web site have the possibility to configure reduced motion settings. Grafana now supports this, either by making animations simpler or removing them altogether. We have implemented a rule, which prohibits unhandled transitions and animations, ensuring that we can continuously support reduced motion.

Original source

Welcome to Grafana 11.0!

This release contains some major improvements: most notably, the ability to explore your Prometheus metrics and Loki logs without writing any PromQL or LogQL, using Explore Metrics and Explore Logs. The dashboard experience is better than ever with edit mode for dashboards, AI-generated dashboard names and descriptions, and general availability for subfolders. You can also take advantage of improvements to the canvas and table visualizations, new transformations, a revamp of the Alert Rule page, and more.

For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog. For the specific steps we recommend when you upgrade to v11.0, check out our Upgrade Guide.

Breaking changes

For Grafana v11.0, we’ve also provided a list of breaking changes to help you upgrade with greater confidence. For information about these along with guidance on how to proceed, refer to Breaking changes in Grafana v11.0.

Explore Metrics and Logs

Explore Metrics

Public preview in all editions of Grafana

Explore Metrics is a query-less experience for browsing Prometheus-compatible metrics. Search for or filter to find a metric. Quickly find related metrics - all in just a few clicks. You do not need to learn PromQL! With Explore Metrics, you can:

• easily slice and dice metrics based on their labels, so you can see anomalies right away
• See the right visualization for your metric based on its type (e.g. gauge vs. counter) without building it yourself
• surface other metrics relevant to the current metric
• “explore in a drawer” - expand a drawer over a dashboard with more content, so you don’t lose your place
• view a history of user steps when navigating through metrics and their filters
• easily pivot to other related telemetry - IE, logs or traces

… all without writing any queries!

To learn more, refer to Explore Metrics as well as the following video demo:

Explore Logs

Experimental in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise

Explore Logs is a queryless experience for exploring Loki logs - no LogQL required! The primary interaction modes are point-and-click based on log volume, similar to Explore Metrics.

Highlights:

• View log volume and log line samples when you first land in Explore Logs (no more “blank screen!”)
• Explore additional labels and detected fields in a similar way, focusing on volume and distribution; add them to your “query” to refine your logs search without needing LogQL – See common patterns in your log lines, to easily filter out noise or focus in on anomalies
• For power users, an easy way to hop into the familiar Explore while preserving context

Explore Logs is Open Source, and experimental - some papercuts are to be expected. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Dashboards and visualizations

Scenes powered Dashboards

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

For the past few months we’ve been working on a major update of our Dashboards architecture and migrated it to the Scenes library. This migration provides us with more stable, dynamic, and flexible dashboards as well as setting the foundation for what we envision the future of Grafana dashboards will be. Here are two of the improvements that are being introduced as part of this work.

Edit mode

It can be difficult to efficiently navigate through the visually cluttered options during the dashboard editing process. With the introduction of the edit mode, we aim to provide an easier way to discover and interact with the dashboard edit experience.

Fixed positioning of template variables and time picker

We moved the time picker into the dashboard canvas and now, together with template variables, it will stick to the top as you scroll through your dashboard. This has historically been a very requested feature that we’re very happy to be able to finally roll out!

Known limitations

• The variable dependency graph is not yet available.
• It’s no longer possible to switch a regular panel to a library panel from the edit view.

If you want to learn more, in detail, about all the improvements we’ve made, don’t miss our blog post.

Scenes for viewers

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Dashboards, when accessed by users with the Viewer role, are now using the Scenes library. Those users shouldn’t see any difference in the dashboards apart from two small changes to the user interface (UI): the variables UI has slightly changed and the time picker is now part of the dashboard container.

Dashboards aren’t affected for users in other roles.

This is the first step towards a more robust and dynamic dashboarding system that we’ll be releasing in the upcoming months.

Subfolders

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Subfolders are here at last!

Some of you want subfolders in order to keep things tidier. It’s easy for dashboard sprawl to get out of control, and setting up folders in a nested hierarchy helps with that.

Others of you want subfolders in order to create nested layers of permissions, where teams have access at different levels that reflect their organization’s hierarchy.

We are thrilled to bring this long-awaited functionality to our community of users! Subfolders are currently being rolled out to Grafana Cloud instances and will be generally available to all Grafana users for the Grafana 11 release.

Just a quick note: the upgrade to enable subfolders can cause some issues with alerts in certain cases. We think these cases are pretty rare, but just in case, you’ll want to check for this:

If you’ve previously set up a folder that uses a forward slash in its name, and you have an alert rule in that folder, and the notification policy is set to match that folder’s name, notifications will be sent to the default receiver instead of the configured receiver.

To correct this, take the following steps:

• Create a copy of the affected routes
• Rewrite the matchers for the new copy. For example, if the original matcher was grafanafolder=folder_with/in_title, then the new route matcher will be grafana_folder=folder_with/_in_title
• After rewriting the matchers, you can delete the old routes.

If you use file provisioning, you can upgrade and update the routes at the same time.

Use AI to generate titles and descriptions for panels and dashboards

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You can now use generative AI to assist you in your Grafana dashboards. So far generative AI can help you generate panel and dashboard titles and descriptions - You can now generate a title and description for your panel or dashboard based on the data you’ve added to it. This is useful when you want to quickly visualize your data and don’t want to spend time coming up with a title or description.

Make sure to enable and configure Grafana’s LLM app plugin. For more information, refer to the Grafana LLM app plugin documentation.

When enabled, look for the ✨ Auto generate option next to the Title and Description fields in your panels and dashboards, or when you press the Save button.

Improvements to the canvas visualization

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve made a number of improvements to the canvas visualization.

Enhanced flowcharting functionality

With this release, we’ve updated the canvas visualization to include much-requested flowcharting features. These improvements are:

• Addition of widely-used elements: cloud, parallelogram, and triangle.
• Addition of midpoint controls so that the connectors no longer have to be straight lines.
• Addition of more connector styles including dashed lines as well as corner radius and direction control.
• Horizontal and vertical snapping for connectors.
• Addition of rounded corner styling for elements.
• Ability to rotate elements in the canvas.

Universal data link support

We’ve updated data links so that you can add them to almost all elements or element properties that are tied to data. Previously, you could only add data links to text elements or elements that used the TextConfig object. This update removes that limitation.

NOTE

This update doesn’t apply to the drone and button elements.

Infinite panning for the canvas visualization

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

With the newly added Infinite panning editor option, you can now view and navigate very large canvases. This option is displayed when the Pan and zoom switch is enabled.

To try out this feature, you must first enable the canvasPanelPanZoom feature toggle.

Colored table rows with conditional formatting

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Grafana 11 adds the ability to color full table rows using the Colored background cell type of the table visualization. When you configure fields in a table to use this cell type, an option to apply the color of the cell to the entire row becomes available.

This feature is useful for a wide variety of use cases including mapping status fields to colors (for example, info, debug, warning) and allowing rows to be colored based on threshold values. This is one of the first steps in making formatting tables more seamless, and allows for quick scanning of data using the table visualization.

To learn more, refer to the documentation for the Colored background cell type.

Set threshold colors in the Config from query transformation

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You now have the ability to customize specific colors for individual thresholds when using the Config from query results transformer. Previously, when you added multiple thresholds, they all defaulted to the same color, red. With this addition, you gain the flexibility to assign distinct colors to each threshold.

This feature addresses a common pain point highlighted by users. With customizable threshold colors, you now have greater control over your data representation, fostering more insightful and impactful analyses across diverse datasets.

Substring matcher added to the Filter by value transformation

Generally available in Grafana Cloud and Open Source

This update to the Filter data by values transformation simplifies data filtering by enabling partial string matching on field values thanks to two new matchers: Contains substring and Does not contain substring. With the substring matcher built into the Filter data by values transformation, you can efficiently filter large datasets, displaying relevant information with speed and precision. Whether you’re searching for keywords, product names, or user IDs, this feature streamlines the process, saving time and effort while ensuring accurate data output.

In the Filter data by values transformation, simply add a condition, choose a field, choose your matcher, and then input the string to match against.

This update will be rolled out to customers over the next few weeks.

Reporting

PDF export improvements

Available in public preview in Grafana Cloud and Enterprise

Introducing a major performance improvement for the PDF export feature.

Are you tired of waiting for your PDF to be generated or your report to be sent? We’re working on a major update of the dashboard-to-PDF feature to make it faster for large dashboards. The generation time will no longer be proportional to the number of panels in your dashboard. As an example, an SLO dashboard containing around 200 panels has gone from taking more than seven minutes to be generated to only eleven seconds.

This update also fixes all caveats related to rendering a report with panels or rows set to repeat by a variable, like rendering repeating panels inside collapsed rows.

To try out this update, enable the newPDFRendering feature toggle.

Alerting

Keep Last State for Grafana Managed Alerting

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

(Re-)introducing “Keep Last State” to Grafana managed alert rules.

You can now choose to keep the last evaluated state of an alert rule when that rule produces “No Data” or “Error” results. Simply choose the “Keep Last State” option for no data or error handling when editing a rule. Refer to the Alerting documentation on state and health of alert rules for more information.

Alert detail view redesign

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The new alert rule detail view has a new look and feel with helpful metadata at the top. The namespace and group are shown in the breadcrumb navigation. This is interactive and can be used to filter rules by namespace or group. The rest of the alert detail content is split up into tabs:

Query and conditions

View the details of the query that is used for the alert rule, including the expressions and intermediate values for each step of the expression pipeline. A graph view is included for range queries and data sources that return time series-like data frames.

Instances

Explore each alert instance, its status, labels and various other metadata for multi-dimensional alert rules.

History

Explore the recorded history for an alert rule.

Details

Debug or audit using the alert rule metadata and view the alert rule annotations.

RBAC for alert rule provisioning APIs

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Alerting Provisioning HTTP API has been updated to enforce Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

• For Grafana OSS, users with the Editor role can now use the API.
• For Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud, users with the role Rules Writer and Set Provisioning status can access the API and limit access to alert rules that use a particular data source.
• Other roles related to provisioning, for example Access to alert rules provisioning API still work.

Data sources

Removal of old Tempo Search and Loki Search in Tempo

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Removal of old Tempo Search tab

In Grafana v10.1, we added a Tempo search editor powered by TraceQL (search tab). We also recommended using this new editor over the older non-TraceQL powered editor.

The older non-TraceQL powered editor has been removed. Any existing queries using the older editor will be automatically migrated to the new TraceQL-powered editor.

The new TraceQL-powered editor makes it much easier to build your query by way of static filters, better input/selection validation, copy query to the TraceQL tab, query preview, dedicated status filter, and the ability to run aggregate by (metrics summary) queries.

Refer to Query tracing data to learn more.

Removal of Loki Search tab in Tempo

The Loki Search tab has been around since before we could natively query Tempo for traces. This search is used by a low number of users in comparison to the TraceQL-powered editor (Search tab) or the TraceQL tab itself.

If you would like to see what logs are linked to a specific trace or service, you can use the Trace to logs feature, which provides an easy way to create a custom link and set an appropriate time range if necessary.

MSSQL: Windows Active Directory (Kerberos) authentication

Generally available in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise

You can now use Windows Active Directory (or Kerberos) to authenticate to MSSQL servers from Grafana.

There are four primary ways to authenticate from Grafana to a MSSQL instance with Windows Active Directory:

• Windows Active Directory username and password
• Specify the path to a valid keytab file.
• Specify the path to an up to date credential cache.
• Specify the path to a JSON document that holds information about several credential caches and the user and database for each one.

To get started, refer to the Getting Started documentation for MSSQL.

Authentication and authorization

New strong password policy

Available in public preview in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise

If you manage your users using Grafana’s built-in basic authorization as an identity provider, consider enabling our new strong password policy feature.

Starting with Grafana v11.0, you can enable an opinionated strong password policy feature. This configuration option validates all password updates to comply with our strong password policy.

To learn more about the strong password policy in Grafana, refer to the documentation.

Anonymous users are billed in Grafana Enterprise

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise

We are announcing a license change to the anonymous access feature in Grafana 11. As you may already be aware, anonymous access allows users access to Grafana without login credentials. Anonymous access was an early feature of Grafana to share dashboards; however, we recently introduced Public Dashboards which allows you to share dashboards in a more secure manner. We also noticed that anonymous access inadvertently resulted in user licensing issues. After careful consideration, we have decided to charge for the continued use of anonymous access starting in Grafana 11.

Affected Grafana versions

Anonymous authentication is disabled by default in Grafana Cloud. This licensing change only affects Grafana Enterprise (self-managed) edition. Anonymous users will be charged as active users in Grafana Enterprise.

Documentation

Original source

Dashboards and visualizations

AngularJS plugin warnings in dashboards

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

AngularJS support in Grafana was deprecated in v9 and will be turned off by default in Grafana v11. When this happens, any plugin which depended on AngularJS will not load, and dashboard panels will be unable to show data.

To help you understand where you may be impacted, Grafana now displays a warning banner in any dashboard with a dependency on an AngularJS plugin. Additionally, warning icons are present in any panel where the panel plugin or underlying data source plugin has an AngularJS dependency.

This complements the existing warnings already present on the Plugins page under the administration menu.

In addition, you can use our detect-angular-dashboards open source tool, which can be run against any Grafana instance to generate a report listing all dashboards that have a dependency on an AngularJS plugin, as well as which plugins are in use. This tool also supports the detection of private plugins that are dependent on AngularJS, however this particular feature requires Grafana v10.1.0 or higher.

Use the aforementioned tooling and warnings to plan migrations to React based visualizations and data sources included in Grafana or from the Grafana plugins catalog.

To learn more, refer to the Angular support deprecation, which includes recommended alternative plugins.

Data visualization quality of life improvements

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve made a number of small improvements to the data visualization experience in Grafana.

Geomap geojson layer now supports styling

You can now visualize geojson styles such as polygons, point color/size, and line strings. To learn more, refer to the documentation.

Canvas elements now support snapping and aligning

You can precisely place elements in a canvas with ease as elements now snap into place and align with one another.

View data links inline in table visualizations

You can now view your data links inline to help you keep your tables visually streamlined.

Create subtables in table visualizations with Group to nested tables

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

You can now create subtables out of your data using the new Group to nested tables transformation. To use this feature, enable the groupToNestedTableTransformation feature toggle.

Set library panel permissions with RBAC

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

We’ve added the option to manage library panel permissions through role-based access control (RBAC). With this feature, you can choose who can create, edit, and read library panels. RBAC provides a standardized way of granting, changing, and revoking access when it comes to viewing and modifying Grafana resources, such as dashboards, reports, and administrative settings.

Tooltip improvements

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

We’ve made a number of small improvements to the way tooltips work in Grafana. To try out the new tooltips, enable the newVizTooltips feature toggle.

Copy on click support

You can now copy the content from within a tooltip by clicking on the text.

Scrollable content

You can now scroll the content of a tooltip, which allows you to view long lists. This is currently supported in the time series, candlestick, and trend visualizations. We’ll add more improvements to the scrolling functionality in a future version.

Added tooltip options for candlestick visualization

The default tooltip options are now also visible in candlestick visualizations.

Hover proximity option in time series

We’ve added a tooltip hover proximity limit option (in pixels), which makes it possible to reduce the number of hovered-over data points under the cursor when two datasets are not aligned in time.

Return to previous

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

When you’re browsing Grafana - for example, exploring the dashboard and metrics related to an alert - it’s easy to end up far from where you started and hard get back to where you came from. The ‘Return to previous’ button is an easy way to go back to the previous context, like the alert rule that kicked off your exploration. This first release works for Alerts, and we plan to expand to other apps and features in Grafana in future releases to make it easier to navigate around.

Return to Previous is rolling out across Grafana Cloud now. To try Return to Previous in self-managed Grafana, turn on the returnToPrevious feature toggle in Grafana v10.4 or newer.

NOTE

The term context refers to applications in Grafana like Incident and OnCall, as well as core features like Explore and Dashboards.

To notice a change in your context, look at Grafana’s breadcrumbs. If you go from Home > Dashboards to Home > Explore, you’ve changed context. If you go from Home > Dashboards > Playlist > Edit playlist to Home > Dashboards > Reporting > Settings, you are in the same context.

Alerting

Simplified Alert Notification Routing

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

This feature simplifies your options for configuring where your notifications are sent when an alert rule fires. Choose an existing contact point directly from within the alert rule creation form without the need to label match notification policies. You can also set optional muting, grouping, and timing settings directly in the alert rule.

Simplified routing inherits the alert rule RBAC, increasing control over notification routing while preventing accidental notification policy updates, ensuring critical notifications make it to their intended contact point destination.

To try out Simplified Alert Notification Routing enable the alertingSimplifiedRouting feature toggle.

Grafana Alerting upgrade with rule preview

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Users looking to migrate to the new Grafana Alerting product can do so with confidence with the Grafana Alerting migration preview tool. The migration preview tool allows users to view, edit, and delete migrated rules prior cutting over, with the option to roll back to Legacy Alerting.

Rule evaluation spread over the entire evaluation interval

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Grafana Alerting previously evaluated rules at the start of the evaluation interval. This created a sudden spike of resource utilization, impacting data sources. Rule evaluation is now spread over the entire interval for smoother performance utilization of data sources.

UTF-8 Support for Prometheus and Mimir Alertmanagers

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Grafana can now be used to manage both Prometheus and Mimir Alertmanagers with UTF-8 configurations. For more information, please see the release notes for Alertmanager 0.27.0.

Authentication and authorization

SSO Settings UI and Terraform resource for configuring OAuth providers

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

Configuring OAuth providers was a bit cumbersome in Grafana: Grafana Cloud users had to reach out to Grafana Support, self-hosted users had to manually edit the configuration file, set up environment variables, and then they had to restart Grafana. On Cloud, the Advanced Auth page is there to configure some of the providers, but configuring Generic OAuth hasn’t been available until now and there was no way to manage the settings through the Grafana UI, nor was there a way to manage the settings through Terraform or the Grafana API.

Our goal is to make setting up SSO for your Grafana instance simple and fast.

To get there, we are introducing easier self-serve configuration options for OAuth in Grafana. All of the currently supported OAuth providers are now available for configuration through the Grafana UI, Terraform and via the API. From the UI, you can also now manage all of the settings for the Generic OAuth provider.

We are working on adding complete support for configuring all other supported OAuth providers as well, such as GitHub, GitLab, Google, Microsoft Azure AD and Okta. You can already manage some of these settings via the new self-serve configuration options, and we’re working on adding more at the moment.

Data sources

NOTE

The following data sources are released separately from Grafana itself. They are included here for extra visibility.

PagerDuty enterprise data source for Grafana

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

PagerDuty enterprise data source plugin for Grafana allows you to query incidents data or visualize incidents using annotations.

NOTE

Plugin is currently in a preview phase.

You can find more information and how to configure the plugin in the documentation.

Screenshots:

SurrealDB Data Source

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

A SurrealDB data source has been added to the Plugin Catalog, enabling the integration of SurrealDB, a real-time, multi-model database, with Grafana’s visualization capabilities. This datasource allows users to directly query and visualize data from SurrealDB within Grafana, using SurrealDB’s query language.

The SurrealDB data source launches with just the basics today. You can write queries in SurrealQL using the built-in query editor, although many Grafana features like macros are not supported for now.

You can find more information and how to configure the plugin on Github.

Table Visualization for Logs

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The table visualization for logs, announced in public preview for Grafana 10.3, is generally available in Cloud (all editions) and with Grafana 10.4.

New to the table visualization with 10.4:

• the ability to sort columns
• data type autodetection of fields
• autodetection and clean formatting of json fields

Try it out today!

Original source

Welcome to Grafana 10.3! Read on to learn about changes to navigation, visualizations and transformations, alerting, profiling, and logs.

We’ve also included here features released in Grafana 10.2.3, as well as breaking changes from that release. Features that were included in the 10.2.3 release are marked with an asterisk.

For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog. For the specific steps we recommend when you upgrade to v10.3, check out our Upgrade Guide.

Breaking changes

For Grafana v10.3, we’ve also provided a list of breaking changes to help you upgrade with greater confidence. For information about these along with guidance on how to proceed, refer to Breaking changes in Grafana v10.3.

Navigation updates*

Available in public preview in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise

The improved navigation menu gives you a better overview by showing all levels of navigation items in a more compact design. We also implemented a better dock and improved scrolling behavior. Furthermore, we improved the structure of the nav menu and added several new items.

Table data in PDF reports

Available in public preview in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

We’ve improved the reporting experience with options to make all of your table data accessible in PDFs. Previously, if your dashboard included large table visualizations, you couldn’t see all of the table data in your PDF report. Unlike in Grafana, you couldn’t scroll in the PDF table visualization or click on the page numbers. With this new feature, you now have the option to see all the data directly in your PDF without losing your dashboard layout.

We’ve added two format options to the report creation form:

• Include table data as PDF appendix - Adds an appendix to your dashboard PDF.
• Attach a separate PDF of table data - Generates a separate PDF file for your table panel data.

To try out this feature, enable the pdfTables feature toggle or contact Grafana Support to have it enabled in on your Grafana Cloud stack.

Dashboards and visualizations

Moving average and trend lines using transformations

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

Moving average*

Sometimes your data is too noisy to quickly grasp what’s going on. A common way to address this issue is to calculate the moving mean, or moving average, to filter out some of that noise. Luckily, many data sources already support calculating the moving mean, but when the support is lacking or you’re not well versed in the query language, until now, you were stuck with the noise.

By selecting the Window functions mode and using Mean as the calculation for the Add field from calculation transformation, Grafana adds a field with the moving mean for your selected field.

The Window functions mode also supports moving variance and moving standard deviation calculations if you need to analyze the volatility of your metric.

Trend lines*

We’re also adding some basic statistical analysis features as a way to help you visualize trends in your data. The Regression analysis transformation will fit a mathematical function to your data and display it as predicted data points in a separate data frame.

The transformation currently supports linear regression and polynomial regression to the fifth-degree.

Canvas visualization supports pan and zoom

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

Canvas visualizations now support panning and zooming. This allows you to both create and navigate more complex designs.

To enable this feature, you must first enable the canvasPanelPanZoom feature toggle.

Improved tooltips in visualizations*

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

We’ve introduced enhanced tooltips as part of our standardization initiative, unifying the tooltip architecture for a consistent user experience across panels. Packed with features like color indicators, time uniformity, and improved support for long labels, these tooltips go beyond a cosmetic redesign, bringing fundamental changes to elevate your data visualization experience. Stay tuned for more updates!

To try out the new tooltips, enable the newVizTooltips feature toggle. Enhanced tooltips have been implemented for the following visualizations:

• Time series
• Trend
• Heatmap
• Status history
• Candlestick
• State timeline
• XY Chart
• and more coming soon!

NOTE

As this is an ongoing project, the dashboard shared cursor and annotations features are not yet fully supported.

Plot enum values in your time series and state timeline visualizations*

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You can now plot enum values in your time series and state timeline visualizations. This feature is useful when you want to visualize the state of a system, such as the status of a service or the health of a device. For example, you can use this feature to visualize the status of a service as ON, STANDBY, or OFF. To display enum values you can use the convert field transform.

View percent change in stat visualizations

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You can now view percent change in stat visualizations. This makes it easier to understand your data by showing how metrics are changing over time.

Apply data transformations to annotations

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You can now apply data transformations to annotation data. For example, you can now configure how exemplar data is displayed in tooltips.

New Transformations UI experience and documentation upgrades

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve revamped the Transformations user interface to make it cleaner, more user-friendly, and overall better for visualizing, selecting, and comprehending transformation options for your data.

Improved UI*

In the past, transformations were applied through a dropdown menu, indicated solely by text names like Merge, Sort, JoinByLabels, etc. Now, we’ve introduced a much more user-friendly interface. A convenient drawer allows seamless access to all transformation options, each accompanied by visual/graphical representations and a brief description. These enhancements are designed to enhance the user’s comprehension of their data transformation choices.

In-App documentation

We’ve also streamlined the user experience by integrating documentation directly into the core Grafana application. Gone are the days of navigating to a separate browser page for Transformation documentation. Now, users can conveniently access documentation within the app interface, providing a more seamless and efficient way to understand and utilize various features. This enhancement aims to save time and enhance user convenience, ensuring that valuable information is readily available at their fingertips.

Copy and paste time range

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Copying and pasting time range in the time range picker is now available. For example, you can copy a time range in Explore and paste it into Dashboards and vice versa. You can also copy and paste a time range using the new keyboard shortcuts t+c and t+v, respectively.

Profiles

Trace to Profiles*

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

Using Trace to profiles, you can use Grafana’s ability to correlate different signals by adding the functionality to link between traces and profiles.

Trace to profiles lets you link your Grafana Pyroscope data source to tracing data. When configured, this connection lets you run queries from a trace span into the profile data.

There are two ways to configure the trace to profiles feature:

• Use a simplified configuration with default query, or
• Configure a custom query where you can use a template language to interpolate variables from the trace or span.

To try out Trace to profiles, enable the ’traceToProfiles’ feature toggle.

If you would also like to try out the Embedded Flame Graph feature, please enable the ’tracesEmbeddedFlameGraph’ feature toggle.

Note: in order to determine that there is a profile for a given span and render the ‘Profiles for this span’ button or the embedded flame graph in the span details, the ‘pyroscope.profile.id’ key-value pair must exist in your span tags.

FlameGraph: Collapsing similar items in the graph*

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

Sometimes profile stacks contain lots of levels with similar repeating items, for example long stacks of framework code that usually isn’t of interest but takes up a lot of visual real estate. With this feature, instead of rendering all of the similar items we render only one and allow to expand those collapsed items on demand.

To try it out, enable the ‘traceToProfiles’ feature toggle. To enable it in your Grafana Cloud stack, contact Grafana Support.

Alerting

Alerting insights*

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Use Alerting insights to monitor your alerting data, discover key trends about your organization’s alert management performance, and find patterns in why things go wrong.

Export alerting resources to Terraform

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Export your alerting resources, such as alert rules, contact points, and notification policies as Terraform resources. A new “Modify export” mode for alert rules enables you to edit provisioned alert rules and export a modified version.

Contact points list view redesign

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Contact points list view has been redesigned and split into two tabs: Contact Points and Notification Templates, making it easier to view all contact point information at a glance. You can now search for name and type of contact points and integrations, view how many notification policies each contact point is being used for, and navigate directly to the linked notification policies.

Create alerts from panels*

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Create alerts from dashboard panels. You can reuse the panel queries and create alerts based on them.

Support for adding responders to Opsgenie alerting contact point*

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Opsgenie contact point has been extended to allow users to optionally fill out responder information for their integration. Responders tell Opsgenie who an alert should notify according to their escalation policies and routing rules.

Recovery thresholds for alerts

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

To reduce the noise of flapping alerts, you can set a recovery threshold different to the alert threshold.

Flapping alerts occur when a metric hovers around the alert threshold condition and may lead to frequent state changes, resulting in too many notifications being generated.

Logs

Logs Table UI

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

Table view was created to help facilitate ease of use in a point and click UI, as opposed to datasource specific query language formatting options, like loki’s line_format.

Tables can be configured and shared with team members via explore URLs or by adding the table to a dashboard panel.

Data sources

Data source Admin permission*

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

In addition to Query and Edit access, you can now grant users, teams, or basic roles Admin access to data sources. Users with Admin access to a data source can grant and revoke permissions to the data source, as well as to manage query caching settings for the data source. Users are automatically granted Admin access to data sources that they create.

Redshift and Athena: Async query caching

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise, Grafana Cloud Advanced and Cloud Pro

Introducing query caching for async queries in the Athena and Redshift data source plugins. We previously introduced async queries for the Athena and Redshift plugins, and this feature adds support for caching those queries. To use this, you must have query caching enabled for the Athena or Redshift data source you wish to cache. This feature was previously available behind a feature toggle and is now generally available and enabled by default.

NOTE

The useCachingService feature toggle must also be enabled to use this feature.

Loki data source improvements: “or” filter syntax, filter by label types, derived fields by labels

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Introducing several improvements to the Loki data source.

Line filter “or” syntax*

Loki’s line filter syntax is great to find specific substrings of your log lines. If users want to find multiple different substrings it was cumbersome to use the regex =~ operator. With this change it is possible to chain multiple strings with the existing filter operators.

Example:

{app="foo"} |= "foo" or "bar" != "baz" or "qux"

Filter based on label type*

Grafana users can use the action buttons in the log details to filter for specific labels. Those would be always added as a LabelFilter expression regardless of the type of the label. Now, filtered labels will be added either to the stream selector if the label is an indexed label, or as a LabelFilter expression if the label is a parsed label or part of structured metadata.

Derived fields based on labels*

Derived fields or data links are a concept to add correlations based on your log lines. Previously it was only possible to add derived fields based on a regular expression of your log line and doing it based on labels was not possible. With this change derived fields can be added either based on a regex of a log line or based on a label, parsed label or structured metadata.

The following example would add the derived field traceID regex based on a regular expression and another app label field based on the app label.

InfluxDB native SQL support

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

InfluxDB introduced a new version, 3.0, in April. With this new version, InfluxDB has put Flux in maintenance mode. But with the new version we have a new querying language, Native SQL. With v10.3.0, Grafana has built-in support for SQL query language in InfluxDB.

All you need to do is set up your InfluxDB Cloud Account and create your InfluxDB data source on Grafana with the query language “SQL” selected.

Authentication and authorization

Grafana Anonymous Access*

Generally available in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise

We’ve identified a need for users who enable anonymous authentication to monitor the anonymous devices connected to their Grafana instance. This feature is part of our ongoing efforts to enhance control and transparency regarding anonymous usage.

Anonymous access now allows users, including those in open-source and enterprise self-managed environments, to view and monitor their anonymous access. They can also set a device limit, configuring a specific number of anonymous devices to connect to their instance.

Once this limit is reached, any new devices attempting to connect will be denied access until existing devices disconnect.

The anonymous devices feature improves the management and monitoring of anonymous access within your Grafana instance.

Anonymous Device:

When anonymous access has been enabled, any device which accesses Grafana in the last 30 days (without logging in) is considered an active anonymous device. Users can now view anonymous devices on the users page, anonymous usage statistics, including the count of devices and users over this period.

Grafana UI:

• Navigate to Administration -> Users to access the anonymous devices tab.
• A new statistic has been added to the Usage & Stats page, displaying active anonymous devices from the last 30 days.

Original source

Share your dashboard with the world: Public dashboards are generally available

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Public dashboards allow you to share your visualizations and insights with a broader audience without the requirement of a login. You can effortlessly use our current sharing model and create a public dashboard URL to share with anyone using the generated public URL link. To learn more, refer to the Public dashboards documentation, as well as the following video demo:

Navigate lengthy, mixed data in Explore with Content Outline

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Introducing Content Outline in Grafana Explore. It’s easy to lose track of your place when you’re running complex mixed queries or switching between logs and traces. Content outline is our first step towards seamless navigation from log lines to traces and back to queries, ensuring quicker searches while preserving context. Experience efficient, contextual investigations with this update in Grafana Explore. To learn more, refer to the Content outline documentation, as well as the following video demo.

Correlations

Grafana Correlations is a new public preview feature you can use to establish links from any data source query to any other, carrying forward data like namespace, host, or label values. This is extremely powerful for performing root cause analysis with a diverse set of data sources. For more information, refer to the documentation.

Create Correlations the easy way in Grafana Explore

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

Creating correlations has just become easier. Try out our new correlations editor in Explore by selecting the + Add > Add correlation option from the top bar or from the command palette. The editor shows all possible places where you can place data links and guides you through building and testing target queries. For more information, refer to the documentation.

To try out Correlations, enable the correlations feature toggle.

Create correlations for provisioned data sources

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

In previous versions of Grafana, if a data source was provisioned, the only way to add correlations to it was also with provisioning. Now, that’s no longer the case, and you can easily create new correlations mixing both methods—using the Administration page or provisioning. For more information, refer to the documentation.

To try out Correlations, enable the correlations feature toggle.

Dashboards and visualizations

Use AI to generate titles, descriptions, and change summaries

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

You can now use generative AI to assist you in your Grafana dashboards. So far generative AI can help you with the following tasks:

• Generate panel and dashboard titles and descriptions - You can now generate a title and description for your panel or dashboard based on the data you’ve added to it. This is useful when you want to quickly visualize your data and don’t want to spend time coming up with a title or description.
• Generate dashboard save changes summary - You can now generate a summary of the changes you’ve made to a dashboard when you save it. This is great for effortlessly tracking the history of a dashboard.

To enable these features, you must first enable the dashgpt feature toggle. Then install and configure Grafana’s LLM app plugin. For more information, refer to the Grafana LLM app plugin documentation.

When enabled, look for the ✨ Auto generate option next to the Title and Description fields in your panels and dashboards, or when you press the Save button.

Find your dashboard faster with the new Dashboards browse screen

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The new browse screen for dashboards features a more compact design, making it easier to navigate, search for, and manage your folders and dashboards. The new interface also has many performance improvements, especially for instances with a large number of folders and dashboards.

To make using folders easier and more consistent, there’s no longer a special General folder. Dashboards without a folder, or dashboards previously in the General folder, are now shown at the root level.

To try it out, go to the Dashboards section of your Grafana instance.

Create interactive buttons in canvas visualizations

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

You can now add buttons to your canvas visualizations. Buttons can be configured to call an API endpoint. This pushes Grafana’s capabilities to new heights, allowing you to create interactive dashboards that can be used to control external systems.

To learn more, refer to our Canvas button element documentation, as well as the following video demo.

Zoom in on the y-axis of the time series and candlestick visualizations

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You can now zoom in on the y-axis of your time series and candlestick visualizations. This is useful when you want to focus on a specific range of values. To zoom in on the y-axis on supported visualizations, hold the Shift key while clicking and dragging; double-click to reset the zoom.

Calculate visualization min/max individually per field

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

When visualizing multiple fields with a wide spread of values, calculating the min or max value of the visualization based on all fields can hide useful details.

Now, you can automatically calculate the min or max of each visualized field based on the lowest and highest value of the individual field. This setting is available in the standard options of most visualizations.

This isn’t only useful in the stat visualization—gauge, bar gauge, and status history visualizations, table cells formatted by thresholds, and gauge table cells all benefit from this addition.

Data visualization quality of life improvements

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve made a number of smaller improvements to the data visualization experience in Grafana.

Geomap marker symbol alignment options

You can now offset geomap marker symbols from the underlying data point.

Gauge visualization overflow support

You can now visualize gauges in vertical and horizontal orientations with overflow. This resolves an issue where the design would break when the number of gauges exceeded the available space.

Bar chart axes improvements

You can now center bar chart axes on zero and configure axes border and color settings.

Data sources and querying

Tempo data source

We’ve placed special focus on the Tempo data source over the past couple of months with new features, query performance improvements, and a better query experience.

Compute RED metrics over spans aggregated by attribute with the “Aggregate By” Search option

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

Requires Tempo or Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET) v2.2 or greater.

We’ve added an Aggregate By option to the TraceQL query editor to leverage Tempo’s metrics summary API. You can calculate RED metrics (total span count, percent erroring spans, and latency information) for spans of kind=server received in the last hour that match your filter criteria, grouped by whatever attributes you specify.

This feature is disabled by default. To enable it, use the metricsSummary experimental feature toggle.

For more information, refer to the documentation, as well as the following video demo.

Query traces more easily with the Improved TraceQL editor

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The TraceQL query editor has been improved to facilitate the creation of TraceQL queries. In particular, it now features improved autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and error reporting.

Group multiple spansets per trace

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The TraceQL query editor has been improved to facilitate the grouping of multiple spans per trace in TraceQL queries. For example, when by(resource.service.name) is added to your TraceQL query, it will group the spans in each trace by resource.service.name.

Create query-type template variables for the Tempo data source

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Tempo data source now supports query-type template variables. With this update, you can create variables for which the values are a list of attribute names or attribute values seen on spans received by Tempo.

To learn more, refer to the following video demo, as well as the Grafana Variables documentation.

SAP HANA®: Configure your data source with tenant database instance name and number

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

The SAP HANA® data source now supports tenant database connections by using the database name and/or instance number. This is helpful because these are less likely to change than the port for your database. For more information, refer to our SAP HANA® configuration documentation.

Datadog: Aggregate logs to compute metrics and time series

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

The Datadog data source now supports log aggregation. This feature helps aggregate logs/events into buckets and compute metrics and time series. For more information, refer to Datadog log aggregation.

Datadog: Rate-limit requests from the Datadog data source

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

In the Datadog data source, you can now block API requests for metric queries based on upstream rate limits. With this update, you can set a rate limit percentage at which the plugin stops sending queries.

To learn more, refer to Datadog data source settings, as well as the following video demo.

Microsoft SQL Server: Support for Azure Authentication (Service principal/MSI)

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve added support for Azure Authentication (Service principal/MSI) on our MS SQL plugin to authenticate and allow querying of content stored in SQL Managed Instance databases.

Enable this feature by setting the managed_identity_enabled property to true under the Azure heading in your configuration file (/conf/.ini). Then take the following steps in your Microsoft SQL Server data source configuration UI:

• Under Authentication, select Azure AD Authentication in the drop-down to reveal the Azure Authentication Settings section.
• In this section, select either Managed Identity or App Registration.
• Enter the credentials accordingly.

Learn more in the Microsoft SQL Server documentation.

Transformations

As our work on improving the user experience of transforming data continues, we’ve also been adding new capabilities to transformations.

Use dashboard variables in transformations

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

Previously, the only transformation that supported dashboard variables was the Add field from calculation transformation. We’ve now extended the support for variables to the Filter by value, Create heatmap, Histogram, Sort by, Limit, Filter by name, and Join by field transformations.

We’ve also made it easier to find the correct dashboard variable by displaying available variables in the fields that support them, either in the drop-down or as a suggestion when you type $ or press Ctrl + Space.

New modes for the Add field from calculation transformation

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Add field from calculation transformation has been updated.

Unary operation is a new mode that lets you apply mathematical operations to a field. The currently supported operations are:

• Absolute value (abs) - Returns the absolute value of a given expression. It represents its distance from zero as a positive number.
• Natural exponential (exp) - Returns e raised to the power of a given expression.
• Natural logarithm (ln) - Returns the natural logarithm of a given expression.
• Floor (floor) - Returns the largest integer less than or equal to a given expression.
• Ceiling (ceil) - Returns the smallest integer greater than or equal to a given expression.

Also, Row index can now show the index as a percentage.

Learn more in the Add field from calculation documentation.

Format strings with transformations

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

With the new Format string transformation, you can manipulate string fields to improve how they’re displayed. The currently supported operations are:

• Change case changes the case of your string to upper case, lower case, sentence case, title case, pascal case, camel case, or snake case.
• Trim removes white space characters at the start and end of your string.
• Substring selects a part of your string field.

Learn more in the Format string documentation.

See which transformations will work with your data

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

We’ve added initial support to detect situations in which various transformations won’t work appropriately based on current data. Previously, selecting the appropriate transformation and configuring it correctly required a process of trial and error or already knowing how a given transformation worked. Now, transformations that we’ve detected can’t be used are shaded in the interface to indicate this, along with a helpful message explaining why.

If you have the transformationsRedesign feature flag set, you’ll be able to access this functionality right away. If you’d like to try it, enable this feature flag in your Grafana configuration.

Choose your timezome in the Format time and Convert field type transformations

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve added support for setting timezones manually when formatting times as strings using the Format time and Convert field type transformations. This allows times to be formatted relative to any timezone across the globe.

Alerting

Grafana OnCall integration for Alerting

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Use the Grafana Alerting - Grafana OnCall integration to effortlessly connect alerts generated by Grafana Alerting with Grafana OnCall. From there, you can route them according to defined escalation chains and schedules.

To learn more, refer to the Grafana OnCall integration for Alerting documentation, as well as the following video demo.

Export alerting resources to Terraform

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Export your alerting resources, such as alert rules, contact points, and notification policies as Terraform resources. A new “Modify export” mode for alert rules enables you to edit provisioned alert rules and export a modified version.

Additional contact points for external Alertmanager

Generally available in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise

We’ve added support for the Microsoft Teams contact points when using an external Alertmanager.

Authentication and authorization

No basic role

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

We’re excited to introduce the “No basic role,” a new basic role with no permissions. A basic role in Grafana dictates the set of actions a user or entity can perform, known as permissions. This new role is especially beneficial if you’re aiming for tailored, customized RBAC permissions for your service accounts or users. You can set this as a basic role through the API or UI.

Previously, permissions were granted based on predefined sets of capabilities. Now, with the “No basic role,” you have the flexibility to be even more granular.

For more details on basic roles and permissions, refer to the documentation.

New service account permissions

Service accounts allow you to create tokens to access Grafana’s API and dashboards. Service accounts are a powerful tool for authenticating with Grafana’s API and accessing data sources. However, without proper access controls, service accounts can pose a security risk to your Grafana instance. In Grafana 10.2, we’ve added new tools to limit service accounts to just the resources they need to access.

Add dashboard and folder permissions to service accounts

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

In this release, we’ve added the ability to assign dashboard and folder permissions to service accounts. This means that you can now create a service account that can be used to access a specific dashboard and nothing else.

This is useful if you want to limit the access service accounts have to your Grafana instance.

Learn more in our dashboard and folder permissions documentation.

Add data source permissions to service accounts

Generally available in Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise

Grafana 10.2 also introduces the ability to assign data source permissions to service accounts, for Grafana Cloud and Enterprise users. With this feature, you can create a service account that has access to a specific data source and nothing else. This is useful in scenarios where you want to limit the access service accounts have to your Grafana instance.

For example, imagine you have a team of developers who need to access a specific data source to develop a new feature. Instead of giving them full access to your Grafana instance, you can create a service account that has access only to that data source. This way, you can limit the potential damage that could be caused by a compromised service account.

Learn more in our data source permissions documentation.

Role mapping support for Google OIDC

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You can now map Google groups to Grafana organizational roles when using Google OIDC. This is useful if you want to limit the access users have to your Grafana instance.

We’ve also added support for controlling allowed groups when using Google OIDC.

Refer to the Google Authentication documentation to learn how to use these new options.

Configure refresh token handling separately for OAuth providers

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

With Grafana v9.3, we introduced a feature toggle called accessTokenExpirationCheck. It improves the security of Grafana by checking the expiration of the access token and automatically refreshing the expired access token when a user is logged in using one of the OAuth providers.

With the current release, we’ve introduced a new configuration option for each OAuth provider called use_refresh_token that allows you to configure whether the particular OAuth integration should use refresh tokens to automatically refresh access tokens when they expire. In addition, to further improve security and provide secure defaults, use_refresh_token is enabled by default for providers that support either refreshing tokens automatically or client-controlled fetching of refresh tokens. It’s enabled by default for the following OAuth providers: AzureAD, GitLab, Google.

For more information on how to set up refresh token handling, please refer to the documentation of the particular OAuth provider.

NOTE
The use_refresh_token configuration must be used in conjunction with the accessTokenExpirationCheck feature toggle. If you disable the accessTokenExpirationCheck feature toggle, Grafana won’t check the expiration of the access token and won’t automatically refresh the expired access token, even if the use_refresh_token configuration is set to true.

The accessTokenExpirationCheck feature toggle will be removed in Grafana v10.3.

Permission validation on custom role creation and update

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

With the current release, we enabled RBAC permission validation (rbac.permission_validation_enabled setting) by default. This means that the permissions provided in the request during custom role creation or update are validated against the list of available permissions and their scopes. If the request contains a permission that is not available or the scope of the permission is not valid, the request is rejected with an error message.

Recorded queries: Record multiple metrics from a single query

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud

Recorded queries provide a way to take a static number, (for example, the number of GitHub issues open at a given time, or the number of rows in a database table) and record it periodically as a Prometheus metric. This is great for tracking numbers over time for quick querying later. Previously, recorded queries were limited to a single series, so you needed to narrow your query down to a single number in order to record it. Now, you can record multiple metrics with a single recorded query, which makes them more powerful and easier to create and manage.

Original source

Dashboards and visualizations

Flame graph improvements

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve added four new features to the Flame graph visualization:

• Sandwich view: You can now show a sandwich view of any symbol in the flame graph. Sandwich view shows all the callers on the top and all the callees of the symbol on the bottom. This is useful when you want to see the context of a symbol.
• Switching color scheme: You can now switch color scheme between a color gradient based on the relative value of a symbol or by the package name of a symbol.
• Switching symbol name alignment: Symbols with long names may be hard to differentiate if they have the same prefix. This new option allows you to align the text to the left or right so you can see the part of the symbol name that’s important.
• Improved navigation: You can highlight a symbol or enable sandwich view for a symbol from the table. Also, a new status bar on top of the flame graph displays which views are enabled.

Distinguish widgets from visualizations

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

This experimental feature introduces a clear distinction between two different categories of panel plugin types: visualization panels that consume a data source and a new type, called widgets, that don’t require a data source.

Now, you can easily add widgets like Text, News, and Annotation list without the need to select a data source. The plugins list and library panels are filtered based on whether you’ve selected a widget or visualization, providing a streamlined editing experience.

To see the widget editor in Grafana OSS or Enterprise, enable the vizAndWidgetSplit feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support.

Transformations redesign

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

The transformations tab has an improved user experience and visual redesign. Now, transformations are categorized, and each transformation type has an illustration to help you choose the right one.

Format Time transformation

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

When working with date and time data, it can be useful to have different time formats. With the new Format Time transformation, you can convert any time format to any other one supported by Moment.js. When used in conjunction with the Group by transformation, this can also be used to bucket days, weeks, and other time windows together.

Join by fields transformation outer join (tabular) option

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Join by field transformation has a new option: outer join (tabular). This option is a true outer join for tabular (SQL-like) data. Data can now be joined on a field value that is not distinct. This is different from the previous outer join, which is optimized for time-series data where the join values are never repeated.

Disconnect values in Time series, Trend, and State timeline visualizations

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You can now choose whether to set a threshold above which values in the data should be disconnected. This can be useful in cases where you have sensors that report a value at a set interval, but you want to disconnect the values when the sensor does not respond. This feature complements the existing connect null values functionality.

Geomap Network layer

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

You can now display network data in the Geomap visualization by using the new beta Network layer. This layer supports the same data format as the Node graph visualization.

Heatmap visualizations now support data links

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

You can now add data links to Heatmap visualizations. This allows you to add links to other dashboards, panels, or external URLs that are relevant to the data in your heatmap. We’re pleased to highlight that this feature was a community contribution.

Activate draft reports

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise, Cloud Free, Cloud Pro, and Cloud Advanced

You can now use the resume and pause report functionality to activate draft reports that have all the required fields filled in.

Data sources

Step editor in Loki

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve improved the Loki query editor by adding a new Step editor field. This field allows you to specify a value for the step parameter in Loki queries. You can use this parameter when making metric queries to Loki or when you want a matrix response from your queries.

By default, the step parameter is set to the value of the $__interval variable. This variable is calculated based on the time range and the width of the graph (in pixels). To learn more about the Loki step parameter, refer to our Loki step parameter documentation.

Copy link to a Loki log line

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

New functionality for linking of Loki log lines in Explore allows you to quickly navigate to specific log entries for precise analysis. By clicking the Copy shortlink button for a log line, you can generate and copy a short URL that provides direct access to the exact log entry within an absolute time range. When you open the link, Grafana automatically scrolls to the corresponding log line and highlights it, making it easy to identify and focus on the relevant information.

TraceQL response streaming in Tempo

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

Grafana’s Tempo data source now supports streaming responses to TraceQL queries. With this feature, you can now see partial query results as they come in, so you no longer have to wait for the whole query to finish. This is perfect for big queries that take a long time to return a response.

To use this feature, enable the traceQLStreaming feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support.

Streaming is available for both the Search and TraceQL query types, and you’ll get immediate visibility of incoming traces on the results table. This smooth integration makes data exploration a breeze and speeds up decision-making.

Tempo Search powered by TraceQL

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Search query type was replaced with a new editor powered by TraceQL. This new editor allows you to use the same query language for both Search and TraceQL queries. This change also brings a new UI that makes it easier to write queries and explore your data while using the powerful features offered by TraceQL.

The previous Search interface is now deprecated and will be removed in a future release. We recommend that you start using the new editor as soon as possible and migrate existing dashboards.

Span filtering for traces is GA

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Since the last release, we’ve made several improvements to span filtering. Now, we’re promoting span filters out of public preview and into general availability.

Span filters allow you to work much more efficiently with traces that consist of a large number of spans. Span filters exist above the trace view and allow you to filter the spans that are shown in the trace view. The more filters you add, the more specific the filtered spans.

Currently, you can add one or more of the following filters:

• Service Name
• Span Name
• Duration
• Tags (which includes tags, process tags, and log fields)

To only show the spans you’ve matched, you can enable the Show matches only toggle.

Configuration page redesign for Loki and Elasticsearch

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Loki and Elasticsearch data source configuration pages have been redesigned to make getting started and setting up data sources as simple and easy to understand as possible. You can now find new subsections with links to documentation pages, as well as tooltips to assist you with configuring and customizing data sources.

Easier to use query editor for Elasticsearch

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Elasticsearch query editor now allows convenient switching between logs, metrics, and raw data directly from the top, eliminating the need to go through the metric selector.

Metrics explorer

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

The Metrics explorer is a new feature that enhances metrics browsing in the Prometheus query builder. The Metrics explorer makes it easier for you to find the right metric and get comfortable with PromQL. You can now explore metrics with additional metadata, perform fuzzy search on the metric name or description, and filter on the Prometheus type.

Redshift and Athena: Async query data support

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Async query data support in Redshift and Athena makes queries over multiple requests (starting, checking status, and fetching the results) instead of in a single request query. This is useful for queries that can potentially run for a long time and time out. This feature was previously available behind a feature toggle and is now be generally available and enabled by default.

Redshift and Athena: Async query caching

Experimental in Grafana Enterprise, Cloud Pro, and Cloud Advanced

This feature adds support for query caching of async queries in the Athena and Redshift data source plugins. To try this feature, enable both the useCachingService and awsAsyncQueryCaching feature toggles. If you’re using Grafana Cloud and would like to enable this experimental feature, please contact customer support.

CloudWatch logs Monaco query editor

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

The CloudWatch logs query editor is moving from being a Slate-based editor to a Monaco-based editor. This new Monaco-based editor provides improved syntax highlighting, and auto-completion. To use the Monaco-based query editor, enable the cloudWatchLogsMonacoEditor feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support.

InfluxDB backend mode

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

Previously, InfluxDB backend mode was available, however, there were compatibility issues that needed to be addressed. In this release, we’ve addressed these issues and promoted this feature from experimental to public preview. In the future, backend mode will be the default, and we’ll deprecate frontend mode. To try backend mode, enable the influxdbBackendMigration feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support.

Explore

Logs: Choose which fields to display in a log line

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

When you’re browsing logs in Explore, you can now click the eye icon within a row to replace the log line’s contents with the value of one or more of the log fields or labels. This is helpful for scanning through your logs.

Logs: Improved rendering performance of log lines

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

After a series of performance optimizations to log-related components, browsing log lines is faster than ever.

Logs: See more log lines in log context

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Log context allows you to view additional lines surrounding a specific log entry. With this enhancement, you can access as many log lines as needed within the log context. As you scroll through the logs, Grafana dynamically loads more log lines, ensuring a seamless and continuous viewing experience.

Elasticsearch logs sample

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

For Elasticsearch metric queries in Explore, you can now see the sample of log lines that contributed to the displayed results. To see these logs, click the collapsed logs sample panel under your graph or table panel. If you want to interact with the log lines or modify the log query, click the Open logs in split view button and the log query will be executed in the split view.

Panel plugins in Explore

Experimental in all editions of Grafana

Data source plugin developers can now use any plugin to visualize data in Explore. Similar to preferredVisualizationType, we’ve introduced an experimental API to render visualizations by plugin ID. In the returned data frame, set the meta option preferredVisualisationPluginId to the plugin ID you want to be used when showing the data for given data frame.

Alerting

All Alerting features are generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve made a number of improvements to simplify the alert rule creation process as well as improvements to contact points and alert management. For all the details, refer to our Alerting documentation.

Alert rules

We’ve made the following changes to alert rules.

Alert instance routing preview

This feature is for Grafana-managed alert rules only.

Preview how your alert instances will be routed if they fire while you’re creating your alert rule. You can view routing for each Alertmanager you’ve configured to receive Grafana-managed alerts, and if required, easily make adjustments to your custom labels to change the way your alert instances are routed.

Alert rule types

You can switch to a data source-managed alert rule if your data source is configured to support alert rule creation (Ruler API enabled). By default, the alert rule type is Grafana-managed.

UI improvements

• Alert evaluation behavior: New UI components for creating a folder and adding an evaluation group. along with improved text and validation.
• Alert Rule list page: The process of creating recording rules (More drop-down) is now separate from Grafana-managed and data source-managed alert rules (+New alert rule) .
• Annotations display: Adding a summary, description, and runbook URL as annotations are now optional. The dashboard and panel names are now also linked directly, making them easier to access.
• View YAML button: Displays alert rule configuration in YAML format on the Grafana-managed alert rules form, as well as in the Grafana-managed provisioned and non-provisioned Alert Rule detail view.
• Queries and expressions: Several improvements have been made to the display of queries and expressions, including making Add expression a drop-down and moving Conditions to the header.
• Min interval option: Improves control over query costs and performance by allowing you to adjust the minimum resolution of the data used in your alerting queries.
• In-app guidance for alert rule creation: Learn about how to create your alert rules interactively with in-app guidance for additional context and links out to our Alerting documentation.
• Support for toggling common labels: Toggle between showing or hiding labels for each individual alert instance.

Contact points

We’ve made the following changes to contact points.

Additional contact points for external Alertmanager

We’ve added support for the following contact points when using an external Alertmanager:

• WeChat
• Amazon SNS
• Telegram
• Cisco Webex Teams

Contact point provisioning file export

This update facilitates file provisioning and maintenance for contact points. The feature implements the provisioning API export endpoints for exporting contact points as well as adding export buttons to the contact point list in the UI.

Notification policies

We’ve made the following changes to notification policies.

Notification policy provisioning file export

This update facilitates file provisioning and maintenance for notification policies. The feature implements the provisioning API export endpoints for exporting notification policies as well as adding an export button to the root notification policy in the UI.

Alert management

We’ve made the following changes to alert management.

Support for time zones in mute timings

We’ve added support for different time zones and locations as well as a visual selector for week days, made improvements to loading and error handling, and provided better validation for time ranges.

Label colors for alert instances

Labels are colored according to the label key, which makes it easier to track and view labels across alert instances.

Authentication and authorization

OAuth role mapping enforcement

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

This change impacts GitHub, GitLab, Okta, and Generic OAuth.

Previously, if no organization role mapping was found for a user when they connected using OAuth, Grafana didn’t update the user’s organization role.

Now, on every login, if the role_attribute_path property doesn’t return a role, then the user is assigned the role specified by the auto_assign_org_role option or the default role for the organization, which is Viewer by default.

To avoid overriding manually set roles, enable the skip_org_role_sync option in the Grafana configuration for your OAuth provider before affected users log in for the first time.

Prevent manual role updates for externally synced roles

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

This change impacts all instances that use an external authentication provider and have role mapping enabled.

Previously, it was possible to manually update a user’s organization role (Viewer, Editor, Admin, or Grafana Admin) even if this role was managed by an external authentication provider. This means that roles could be manually set for the duration of a user’s session, but were overridden by the external authentication provider the next time the user logged in. If the onlyExternalOrgRoleSync feature toggle was enabled, only then were manual role updates for externally managed roles not allowed.

Now, you can no longer manually update externally managed organization roles. We’ve removed the onlyExternalOrgRoleSync feature toggle, and have defaulted to locking the organization role of users authenticated by an external provider.

If you prefer to manage your users’ organization roles manually, enable the skip_org_role_sync option in the Grafana configuration for your authentication provider.

For context on the previous work done leading up to this change, refer to the Grafana v9.5 What’s new.

GitLab OIDC support

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Grafana now supports GitLab OIDC through the GitLab OAuth provider in addition to the existing GitLab OAuth2 provider. This allows you to use GitLab OIDC to authenticate users in Grafana.

This change also allows Grafana to reduce the access scope to only the required scopes for authentication and authorization, instead of full read API access.

To learn how to migrate your GitLab OAuth2 setup to OIDC, refer to our GitLab authentication documentation.

Google OIDC and Team Sync support

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Grafana now supports Google OIDC through the Google OAuth provider in addition to the existing Google OAuth2 provider. This allows you to use Google OIDC to authenticate users in Grafana, which in turn, lets Grafana reduce the access scope to only the required scopes for authentication and authorization.

This release also adds support for Google OIDC in Team Sync. You can now easily add users to teams by using their Google groups.

To learn how to migrate your Google OAuth2 setup to OIDC and how to set up Team Sync, refer to our Google authentication documentation.

Plugins

Angular deprecation changes

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We’ve made the following updates to increase awareness of the Angular deprecation and its consequences in future releases of Grafana:

UI changes

• Added an Angular badge next to affected plugins in the plugins catalog.
• Added an alert at the top of a plugin’s page in the plugins catalog when browsing Angular plugins.
• Added an alert at the top of the query editor when editing panels that use Angular data source plugins.

Other changes

• Angular Plugins will not be loaded if angular_support_enabled is set to false.

Learn more in our Angular support deprecation documentation.

Deprecated provisioning of data sources with invalid UIDs

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Grafana now logs an error when provisioning data sources with invalid UIDs. A valid UID is a combination of a-z, A-Z, 0-9 (alphanumericals), - (dashes), and _ (underscores), with a maximum length of 40 characters.

Provisioning data sources with invalid UIDs will be removed in future versions of Grafana, and will return an error instead.

Subfolders: folder selection

Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana

When saving or moving a dashboard, you can now see the full folder tree when selecting the destination folder.

To get started creating subfolders, enable the nestedFolders feature toggle. We recommend that you enable this feature only on test or development instances, rather than in production environments.

Original source

Welcome to Grafana 10.0! Read on to learn about changes to search and navigation, dashboards and visualizations, and security and authentication.
For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog. For the specific steps we recommend when you upgrade to v10.0, check out our Upgrade Guide.

Breaking changes
For Grafana v10.0, we’ve also provided a list of breaking changes to help you upgrade with greater confidence. For information about these along with guidance on how to proceed, refer to Breaking changes in Grafana v10.0.

Correlations
Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana.
You can now bring context from multiple data sources into the Explore experience. Correlations is an extension of our existing data links functionality and now enables you to link from any data source to any other data source.
Correlations enable you to seamlessly jump from one data source to another. You define relationships between your different data sources; when you’re using Explore, simply click a button next to a related field in one data source and Grafana will run the corresponding query in the other data source.
Correlations is currently in preview. As such, we recommended you only enable it on test or development instances, rather than in production environments.
To try out Correlations, enable the correlations feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support.
In subsequent releases, we’ll be refining and enhancing the user interface for Correlations, to provide a more streamlined user experience.

Scenes
Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana.
Scenes is a new front-end library by Grafana that empowers Grafana plugin developers to effortlessly build stunning dashboard-like experiences into their Grafana app plugins. With Scenes, you can easily create apps that mirror the Grafana dashboarding experience, complete with template variable support, flexible layouts, dynamic panel rendering, and so much more.
To try it out, go to the @grafana/scenes repository.
To learn more, refer to the Scenes documentation.

Subfolders
Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana.
You can now try out creating subfolders in Grafana for organizing your dashboards and alerts. You can enable this new feature in your development environment to create, read, update, and delete subfolders, making it easier to sort resources by business units, departments, and teams.
You can also set up permissions using Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Folder permissions cascade, being inherited from the parent folder, which simplifies access management.
The ability to add subfolders is currently in preview, with more functionality coming in subsequent releases. This includes creating subfolders using Terraform, and displaying the full folder tree when creating and moving resources through Grafana’s UI. We recommend that you enable this feature only on test or development instances, rather than in production environments.
To get started creating subfolders, enable the nestedFolders feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud, and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support.

Dashboards and visualizations

The Canvas panel is GA
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
We’re promoting the canvas panel out of public preview and into general availability. Over the past several months we’ve introduced multiple enhancements to the panel such as the ability to draw connections between elements, the ability to set the color and size of connections based on data, and the ability to add data links. We’re excited to include Canvas as a first class citizen in Grafana’s core panel library. To learn more about the panel, refer to our Canvas documentation. Also, check out our latest blog post about canvas.

New Trend Panel
Experimental in all editions of Grafana
The Trends panel allows you to display trends where the x-axis is numeric and not time. This experimental panel addresses gaps that were not solved by either the Time series or XY Chart panels. For example, you can plot function graphs, rpm/torque curves, supply/demand relationships, and more. To learn more about the Trend panel, refer to the Trend documentation.

New Datagrid panel
Experimental in all editions of Grafana
Datagrid is a new panel that allows you to edit your data within a Grafana dashboard. Imagine having a spreadsheet-like view where you can fine-tune data pulled from a data source or create your own dataset from scratch and use it within your dashboard to update your panels in real time. That’s what Datagrid provides. You can also use the Datagrid panel as a data source used by other panels to augment other data.
Currently, the Datagrid Panel supports the following features in Grafana version 10.0:
• Creating and deleting rows and columns
• Data and column header edit or delete
• Search functionality
• Column freezing
• Grid selection actions (copy/paste/delete)
• Draggable columns and rows
• Series selection when pulling data from a data source
In subsequent releases, we’ll continue adding features to the Datagrid panel to further improve the user experience.

Drag and drop spreadsheets into Grafana
Experimental in all editions of Grafana
It’s easier than ever to view local data in Grafana: introducing drag and drop. The drag and drop functionality allows you to upload your csv, Excel, or numbers files by simply dragging and dropping them into the query editor of the Grafana data source.
To try out drag and drop, enable the editPanelCSVDragAndDrop feature toggle.
As of Grafana version 10.0, drag and drop supports the following scenarios:
• Drag and drop files into the panel editor
• Replace files in the panel editor
• Default table panel creation
The data from dragged and dropped files is stored in the dashboard JSON and file size is limited to 1MB. To learn more about drag and drop functionality, refer to the official documentation.

Select data sources more easily
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
Concepts like data sources and dashboard panels are hard to grasp and it can be a struggle to go from Grafana’s “empty state” to a working dashboard that displays data. Our latest advancements streamline the process of selecting the ideal data source in Grafana, prioritizing recent usage, and providing labels and supplementary descriptions.
With this flow, selecting a data source has been greatly simplified, providing a clear overview of available data sources and allowing you to quickly connect to a new one when needed.

Time series time region support
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
We’ve implemented support for adding time regions to the Time series panel. Time regions provide a more contextualized experience, enabling you to highlight certain days of the week, such as Monday to Friday to display work weeks, right alongside your data. Time regions are also a useful way to highlight specific parts of a day like night, work hours, or whatever you want to define for each day. They allow you to quickly orient yourself in parts of the day or ignore highlighted parts of the time series.
To learn more, refer to our time region documentation.

Annotation filtering
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
You can now filter dashboard annotations to apply annotations to all panels or selected panels, or use them to exclude selected panels.
To learn more, refer to our documentation about adding annotation queries.

Redesigned and improved log context
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
We’ve made enhancements to Grafana’s log context feature, resulting in a more seamless and consistent user experience. With the updated user interface, you can expect the same level of functionality and usability in log context as you would in any other logs panel.
Notably, we’ve added the following new features that streamline the log context experience:
• Log details with actions, including a Copy button, to easily copy lines, and an eye icon to display only selected labels, allowing you to focus on specific information without leaving the log context section.
• A Wrap Lines toggle to automatically wrap long lines of text for easier reading and analysis of log entry context directly in log context.
• An Open in split view button to execute the context query for a log entry in a split screen in Explore.
• Only for Loki: A quick-filter menu that lets you easily refine the context query by selecting and removing labels.
These improvements make working with log context in Grafana more intuitive and efficient, ultimately improving the overall user experience.

Query multiple data sources in Explore
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
You can now query multiple data sources simultaneously in Explore. Select “Mixed” from the data source picker and specify a data source for each query.
If you’re using Grafana Open Source or Enterprise, you can disable this feature using the exploreMixedDatasource feature toggle.

Public dashboards
Available in public preview in all editions of Grafana.
Public dashboards allow you to share your Grafana dashboard with anyone without requiring them to log in to Grafana. This is useful when you want to make your dashboard available to the world.
With this update, we’ve made the following improvements:
• The time picker and annotations can be toggled on or off in public dashboard configuration.
• You can see a list of all your public dashboards in Dashboards > Public dashboards.
• The user interface has been improved with a new modal design, as well as paused and not found pages.
• Added support for collapsed rows, hidden queries, and zoom into panels.
To try it out, enable the publicDashboards feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud, and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support.
To learn more, refer to our public dashboards documentation.

Public dashboards insights
Available in public preview in Grafana Enterprise, Cloud Pro, and Cloud Advanced.
Public dashboards insights provide valuable information about your public dashboard usage. You can easily access and view important metrics such as the daily query count, the number of views in the last 30 days, and the number of errors in the last 30 days.
To try it out, enable the publicDashboards feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud, and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support.

Email sharing for public dashboards
Available in public preview in Cloud Pro and Cloud Advanced.
Our email sharing feature allows you to easily share your public dashboards and make them visible only with specific individuals. When you add their email addresses, they receive a one-time link to access the dashboard. This provides you with greater control over who can view your public dashboards.
We’ve also added a Public dashboard users tab in Administration > Users where you can view a list of users who have accessed your public dashboards by way of email sharing.
To try it out, please contact customer support.
NOTE
This feature will have a cost by active users after being promoted into general availability.
To learn more, refer to our public dashboards documentation.

Authentication and authorization

Configure your SAML provider in the Grafana UI
Generally available in Grafana Enterprise, Cloud Pro, and Cloud Advanced.
You can now configure SAML using our new user interface, making the process easier and more convenient than ever before. With the new user interface (UI), you can now configure SAML without needing to restart Grafana and you can control access to the configuration UI by using role-based access control (RBAC), which makes the process much faster and more efficient.
The SAML UI is available in Grafana Enterprise, Cloud Pro, and Advanced. It’s user-friendly, with clear instructions and helpful prompts to guide you through the process.
For more information on how to set up SAML using the Grafana UI, refer to Configure SAML authentication using the Grafana user interface.

Case-insensitive usernames and email addresses
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
Usernames and email addresses are now treated as case-insensitive, which means that you no longer need to worry about capitalization when logging in or creating an account.
From now on, whether you type your username or email address in uppercase, lowercase, or a combination of both, Grafana will treat them as the same. This simplifies the login process and reduces the risk of typos and identity conflicts when changing authentication providers.
To help you deal with potential user identity conflicts, we’ve built a Grafana CLI user identity conflict resolver tool, which is available from Grafana version 9.3.
NOTE
If you’re running Grafana with MySQL as a database, this change doesn’t have any impact as MySQL users were already treated as case-insensitive.

Tracing

Span filtering for traces
Available in public preview in Grafana Cloud Free, Cloud Pro, and Cloud Advanced.
You can now work much more efficiently with traces that consist of a large number of spans with span filtering.
Span filters exist above the trace view and allow you to filter the spans that are shown in the trace view. The more filters you add, the more specifically span are filtered.
Currently, you can add one or more of the following filters:
• Service name
• Span name
• Duration
• Tags (which include tags, process tags, and log fields)
Span filtering is currently in preview. As such, it’s recommended to enable it only on test or development instances, rather than in production environments.
To try it out, enable the newTraceViewHeader feature toggle. This feature is enabled by default in Grafana Cloud.

OpenTelemetry replacing OpenTracing
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
We’ve started the work to migrate to OpenTelemetry in Grafana version 8.4; now we’re removing OpenTracing and, for those who still have it configured, replacing it under the hood with OpenTelemetry. These changes are backwards compatible, so you don’t need to change anything and the feature will continue working as it did before.

Data sources

Azure Monitor data source
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
The Azure Monitor data source now supports visualizing Application Insights Traces. A new query type, Traces, has been added to the service list. This can be used against Application Insights resources to query and visualize traces in both a tabular format and using the built-in Traces visualization.
This also includes support for a new Azure API that will correlate trace IDs against all Application Insights resources that are accessible to the principal that the data source is configured with. To support this feature, a new query builder has been added with support for querying the Application Insights resource using an Operation ID or visualizing and filtering the data based on the event type and a subset of the properties available on the trace.

Prometheus dashboard performance improvements
Experimental in Grafana Open Source.
The Prometheus data source now supports delta (incremental) querying, in which values from data frames are cached and leveraged to modify future requests to avoid requesting duplicate values in dashboards with now-relative (that is, any dashboard querying until “now”) queries. This feature is disabled by default as it is still experimental, but can be enabled and configured in the Prometheus data source configuration.
This update will reduce network load, and speed up now-relative dashboards, especially for dashboards returning a lot of data.

Phlare renamed to Grafana Pyroscope
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
We’ve renamed the Phlare data source Grafana Pyroscope data source as part of the ongoing unification of the Phlare and Pyroscope projects. This data source supports both Phlare and Pyroscope backends. Existing instances of the data source should not be affected. When you create a new instance of the data source, the backend type will be autodetected on the configuration page, or you can select it manually.

Data plane
Generally available in all editions of Grafana.
Data types are now being defined to create a data plane layer between producers and consumers of data. By defining data types as part of Grafana’s platform, plugin and application developers can use these data types to achieve more reliable interoperability across the platform.
Learn more:
• Data plane contract - Technical specification
• Example typed dataframes and Go lib to use them in tests
• Go library for reading and writing dataplane data

Alerting
All Alerting features are generally available in all editions of Grafana.

State history view
Use the improved State history view to get insight into how your alert instances behave over time. View information on when a state change occurred, what the previous state was, the current state, any other alert instances that changed their state at the same time, as well as what the query value was that triggered the change.

Preview notification templates
Preview how your notification templates will look before using them in your contact points.

Security

Trusted Types support
Experimental in all editions of Grafana.
Use trusted types to reduce the risk of XSS vulnerabilities, including the sanitization of third party libraries or plugins that have not explicitly performed sanitization.
To use this feature in report-only mode:
• Enable content_security_policy_report_only in the configuration.
• Add require-trusted-types-for 'script'; to the content_security_policy_report_only_template.
To use it in enforce mode:
• Enable content_security_policy in the configuration.
• Add require-trusted-types-for 'script'; to the content_security_policy_template.
This is an experimental web technology with limited browser support.

Private data source connect
Available in public preview in Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced.
Some data sources, like MySQL databases, Prometheus instances or Elasticsearch clusters, run in private networks, like on premises networks or virtual private clouds (VPCs) running in AWS, GCP, or Azure.
To query these data sources from Grafana Cloud, you’ve had to open your private network to a range of IP addresses, a non-starter for many IT Security teams. The challenge is, how do you connect to your private data from Grafana Cloud, without exposing your network?
The answer is Private Data Source Connect (PDC), available now in public preview in Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced. PDC uses SOCKS over SSH to establish a secure connection between a lightweight PDC agent you deploy on your network and your Grafana Cloud stack. PDC keeps the network connection totally under your control. It’s easy to set up and manage, uses industry-standard security protocols, and works across public cloud vendors and a wide variety of secure networks. Learn more in our Private data source connect documentation.

Plugins

App plugins can start using react-router v6
We’ve added support for using react-router v6 in app plugins. However, we still support the use of react-router v5 for plugins that need to support a minimum Grafana version earlier than v10. For more information, refer to our react-router migration guide.

Original source

Grafana’s new navigation is generally available

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

The navigation in Grafana has been updated with a new design and an improved structure to make it easier for you to access the data you need. With this update, you can quickly navigate between pages, giving you full visibility into the health of your systems.

As Grafana evolved from a visualization platform to a comprehensive observability solution, we added numerous tools to support users throughout the software development life cycle. These tools focus on preventing incidents, monitoring applications or infrastructure, and aiding incident response. However, the added functionality must be easily discoverable and navigable to be truly helpful. These key updates to Grafana’s navigation experience help address this:

• A redesigned navigation menu that groups related tools together for easy access.
• A command palette you can use to take actions in Grafana, like creating a dashboard or navigating to an app or page.
• Updated layouts featuring breadcrumbs and a sidebar, allowing you to quickly jump between pages.
• A new header that appears on all pages in Grafana, which includes a search function.

Join the discussion on GitHub and share your feedback.

Dashboards and visualizations

Redesigned empty dashboard state

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Dashboards have been updated so that it’s easier to begin building from scratch. The options displayed when you add a new dashboard—adding a visualization, a row, or importing panels—each include brief explanations of what those steps will do, so you can begin building with confidence.

Also, a text Add dropdown with these options has replaced the previous “+” icon at the top of the dashboard. This makes it clearer that this element allows you not only to add new panels, but to take all the actions associated with building a new dashboard.

Redesigned dashboard panel is generally available

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Dashboard panels contain a lot of information, some of which is difficult to discover or access from the dashboard. With our redesigned panels, we’ve improved accessibility and made it easier to understand the status of a panel by adding and moving key elements.

We’ve improved panels without titles, made panel descriptions and errors more succinct, and linked key actions from the header of the panel. All of these are laid out from left to right in a row, so there are no overlapping, unusable components.

Grafana’s new panel design is available only for React-based panels. No Angular-based panels, like the legacy Graph and Worldmap panels, are redesigned. As a reminder, Angular is deprecated in Grafana and will be removed in a future release. See our deprecation docs for more information.

Prometheus performance and usability improvements

Prometheus metric encyclopedia

Experimental in all editions of Grafana.

When you have thousands (or millions) of Prometheus metrics, it can be hard to find the exact one you’re looking for. Enable feature toggle prometheusMetricEncyclopedia to replace the basic metric select dropdown in the Prometheus query builder with a paginated and searchable metric encyclopedia.

Here’s what you can do with the metric encyclopedia:

• Fuzzy search for metrics by name, type, and description
• Filter metrics by Prometheus types (gauge, counter, histogram, summary)
• Display metrics in a paginated list, sort the results, and choose a number of results per page, so that you don’t wait a long time for search results
• View metric details, like type and description
• [Expert feature] Search metric names by regex using the backend only

Prometheus browser cache

Experimental in all editions of Grafana.

New feature toggle prometheusResourceBrowserCache provides the ability to cache Prometheus editor API calls in the Prometheus data source configuration. This improves Prometheus query editor performance, with the biggest performance improvements seen by users with high cardinality Prometheus instances.

Removal of API key creation from the UI

With this update we are going one step further in deprecating API keys in favor of service accounts. We’ve removed the button for creating new API keys through Grafana’s user interface, and now only allow the creation of API keys using our HTTP API. We recommend that you migrate your existing API keys to service accounts, and opt for new service accounts instead of new API keys. This change is part of our long-term strategy for sunsetting API keys.

Learn more about the deprecation strategy for API keys and how to manage them in our Sunsetting API keys GitHub issue.

Resolve Grafana issues faster with support bundles

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Support bundles provide a simple way to collect information about your Grafana instance through Grafana’s user interface. In a few clicks, you can create a support bundle containing data about migrations, plugins, settings, and more. Once you’ve created a support bundle, you can either examine it yourself, or share it with your colleagues or Grafana engineers to aid in troubleshooting of your Grafana instance.

Learn more about support bundles and how to configure them in our support bundle documentation.

Alerting

All Alerting improvements are generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Search for alert rules from multiple data sources

Search for and display alert rules for multiple data sources at the same time.

Fuzzy search on the Alert rule list view

Search for namespaces or folders, evaluation groups, and alert rule names on the Alert rules list view with immediate results, and regardless of typos.

Access an alert rule from a dashboard or a panel

Navigate to an alert rule directly from a dashboard or a panel to easily access the alert rule details.

Access a dashboard or panel from an alert rule

Navigate from an alert rule straight to a dashboard or a panel associated with the alert rule to visualize your alerting data.

Preview queries for recording rules

Visualize queries when creating or editing recording rules, so you can see the results of your query before saving your recording rule.

Updated alert behavior when an evaluation returns no data

Alert rules that are configured to fire when an evaluation returns no data now only fire when the entire duration of the evaluation period has finished. This means that rather than immediately firing when the alert rule condition is breached, the alert rule waits until the time set in the For field has finished and then fires, reducing alert noise and allowing for temporary data availability issues.

Improved Notification policies view

Updates to the Notification policies view make it easier to use and manage in the following ways:

• View default policy and nested policies at a glance
• New tab for mute timings
• View alert instances for each policy
• View contact points and which integrations are configured for each policy
• View inherited properties on nested policies
• Search for label matchers and for contact points to see which notifications are going where

Guidance for configuring your Alertmanager

Get additional help while configuring your Alertmanager. If you enter an invalid Alertmanager configuration, an error message displays, and you can choose from a previous working configuration to restart it.

InfluxDB plugin database field deprecation

The database field in the provisioning file has been deprecated. This information will be stored in the jsonData field using the dbName property. The database field will be removed in the future to make InfluxDB consistent with other data sources. For more information and examples please refer to the InfluxDB Provisioning docs.

Auth: Lock organization roles synced from auth providers

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Grafana v9.4 provided the ability to configure synchronization of organization roles for each OAuth provider. With synchronization on, the organization role was applied to the user from the OAuth provider upon signing in. However, after the user signed in, you could still change the user’s organization role during the session.

With this release, we are reinforcing organization role syncing behavior by introducing a new feature toggle called onlyExternalOrgRoleSync. Once enabled, users signing in to Grafana cannot change organization roles that have been synchronized from an external authentication provider, like Active Directory or Google OAuth. This can help ensure the right users maintain the right level of access at all times.

This feature should be used if you want to enforce strict role synchronization from your auth provider to the organization roles.

To use this feature, enable the onlyExternalOrgRoleSync feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support. We’ll also be automatically enabling this feature for Grafana Cloud instances over the upcoming weeks.

You can also prevent the synchronization of organization roles from a given authentication provider. Learn more in our skip org role sync! documentation.

Reporting UI adapted to match the new navigation style

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise, Cloud Pro, and Cloud Advanced.

We updated the reporting UI to better fit the new navigation style, adding a horizontal slider and moving the Preview and Send buttons to the Action section in the page. We also fixed the alignment of the different sections.

Experimental support for using JWTs as auth method

Experimental in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise.

This feature adds support for using JWT tokens to store rendering keys instead of relying on “remote caching”. It covers most rendering use cases, though some still rely on the remote cache as a store. You can enable this by enabling the feature flag renderAuthJWT in the custom.ini configuration file.

Note for plugin developers

One of the major changes coming in Grafana 10 will be our upgrade to React 18 and use of the new React client rendering API. There are many significant benefits we gain from this: access to new React features like transitions and concurrent rendering, as well as other general performance and security improvements. These changes have now been delivered to the core grafana repo with PR 64428.

As with any major upgrade, there’s a potential for this to impact the way your plugin works. In particular, there could be unintended side effects caused by the changes around improving consistency with useEffect timings and automatic batching of state updates.

Recommended actions:

• Review the React 18 upgrade docs
• Test your plugins against one of the latest grafana-dev docker images (for example, this one)
• Add a comment to the forum discussion if your plugin is impacted in any way. Either to socialise the changes needed for your plugin or to reach out and ask for help yourself.

Original source

Welcome to Grafana 9.4! Read on to learn about changes to search and navigation, dashboards and visualizations, and authentication and security. For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog.

Search and navigation

We’ve made the following changes to search and navigation.

Command palette enhancements

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

The command palette has been updated to provide a more efficient way to navigate Grafana. You can now search and access all pages and recent dashboards, making it easier to perform tasks without taking your hands off the keyboard.

To launch the command palette, use the keyboard shortcut cmd + K on Mac or ctrl + K on Linux/Windows.

To learn more about the command palette, refer to Search.

New navigation

Generally available on Grafana Cloud, and available to preview using the topnav feature toggle in all editions of Grafana.

The navigation in Grafana has been updated with a new design and an improved structure to make it easier for you to access the data you need. With this update, you’ll be able to quickly navigate between features, giving you full visibility into the health of your systems.

The new navigation is gradually rolling out to all users on Grafana Cloud. If you’re using Grafana Open Source and Enterprise, you can enable this feature using the topnav feature toggle.

Note: The Grafana documentation has not yet been updated to reflect changes to the navigation.

Note: Plugin developers should refer to the migration guide to upgrade their plugins to work seamlessly with the new navigation layout.

Dashboards and visualizations

We’ve made the following changes to dashboards and visualizations. Learn more about dashboards in our dashboards documentation.

Dashboard panel redesign

Available to preview using the newPanelChromeUI feature toggle in all editions of Grafana.

Dashboard panels contain a lot of information, some of which is difficult to discover or access from the dashboard. With our redesigned panels, we’ve improved accessibility and made it easier to understand the status of a panel by adding and moving key elements.

We’ve rethought the panel information architecture, added additional interaction points, and reduced visual clutter. To start, we’ve improved the support of panels without a header, made a distinction between details set by you and data-induced information, and then included all essential components in the header of the panel. All of these are laid out from left to right in a row, so there are no overlapping, unusable components.

Grafana’s new panel is available only for React-based panels; no Angular-based panels are redesigned. For example, Angular-based panel will still have the old Graph and Table visualizations.

However, we have more planned: we’re going to make even more improvements to the accessibility of panels and improvements to panels without a header.

New data source connection page in Dashboards and Explore

Available to preview using the datasourceOnboarding feature toggle.

When you start your journey to create a dashboard or explore your data, but you don’t have a data source connected yet, you’ll be shown a page that guides you to set up a first connection.

Administrators can choose between selecting one of the most popular data sources or viewing the entire list. Editors are guided to contact their administrator to configure data sources. In both cases, there’s also an option to continue without setting up a data source and to use sample data instead.

Log details redesign

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

We’ve updated the Details section of a log line. Previously some of the interactions, such as filtering, showing statistics, or toggling the visibility were split across Labels and Detected fields. With the recent changes those two sections are combined and the interactions are available for all fields.

Learn more about viewing logs in our Logs panel documentation.

Loki datasource query validation

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

We added support to validate queries and visually display errors as a query is being written, without having to execute it to receive this feedback. This feature supports single and multi-line queries, with and without variables.

Learn more about viewing logs in our Logs panel documentation.

Loki logs sample in Explore

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

For Loki metric queries in Explore, you can now see the sample of log lines that contributed to the displayed results. To see these logs, click on the collapsed Logs sample panel under your graph or table panel. If you want to interact with your log lines or modify the log query, click on the “Open logs in split view” button and the log query will be executed in the split view.

Canvas panel

Available in beta in all editions of Grafana

Canvas is a new panel that combines the power of Grafana with the flexibility of custom elements. Canvas visualizations are extensible form-built panels that allow you to explicitly place elements within static and dynamic layouts. This empowers you to design custom visualizations and overlay data in ways that aren’t possible with standard Grafana panels, all within Grafana’s UI. If you’ve used popular UI and web design tools, then designing Canvas panels will feel very familiar.

In Grafana v9.4, we have added the ability to create connections (arrows). Connections enable you to connect elements together to create more complex visualizations. We also added support for data links and a brand new server element. To learn more about the Canvas panel, refer to Canvas.

Auth and security

All auth updates are generally available in all editions of Grafana.

We’ve made the following changes to authentication and security.

Service account expiration dates

We have added a configuration option that enables you to require an expiration date limit for all newly created service account tokens.

This change will not affect existing tokens. However, newly created tokens will require an expiration date that doesn’t exceed the configuration option token_expiration_day_limit. This option is disabled by default.

Learn more about service accounts in our Service account documentation.

OAuth providers setting for skip org role sync

While Grafana integrates with many different auth providers, we have received requests for a feature that enables you to bypass organization role synchronization for individual providers rather than for all configured providers. This option is now available for users who want to be able to use Grafana to manage their org roles.

This option enables you to skip synchronization from your configured OAuth provider specifically in the auth provider section under skip_org_role_sync. Previously users could only do this for certain providers using the oauth_skip_org_role_sync_update option, but this would include all of the configured providers.

Learn more about Oauth in our Oauth configuration guide.

RBAC support for Grafana OnCall plugin

We’re rolling out RBAC support to Grafana plugins, with Grafana OnCall being the first plugin to fully support RBAC. Previously, Grafana OnCall relied on the Grafana basic roles (for example, Viewer, Editor, and Admin) for authorization within the plugin.

Before RBAC support in Grafana OnCall, it was only possible to allow your organization’s users to either view everything, edit everything, or be an admin (which allowed edit access plus a few additional behaviors). With this new functionality, organizations will be able to harness fine-grained access control within Grafana OnCall.

For example, you can assign a Viewer basic role to a user in your organization (users must still have a basic role assigned) and also assign them the new Grafana OnCall RBAC role of Schedules Editor. This assignment enables the user to view everything in Grafana OnCall, and edit OnCall schedules.

Learn more about role-based access control in our RBAC docs.

SAML auto login

We’ve added auto-login support for SAML authentication, which you can turn on with the auto_login configuration option. We also have a unified configuration style among all authentication providers. Instead of using oauth_auto_login, use the new auto_login option to enable automatic login for specific OAuth providers.

Learn more about SAML setup in our SAML configuration guide.

Auditing and Usage Insights: Support for Loki multi-tenancy

This feature is available for Enterprise customers

This feature adds support to push analytics events and auditing logs to Loki with multi-tenancy mode, by specifying a tenant id. Learn more about auditing and usage insights in our docs.

Reporting: Zoom in and out on your dashboard in a report PDF

This feature is available for Enterprise customers

Zoom is a new feature for reports that allows you to change the dimension of the panels of the PDF document. It enables you to zoom out to show more columns in a table, or zoom in to enlarge panels. You can modify the scale factor for each report in the report editor when you share the PDF directly from the dashboard page.

Learn more about reporting in our documentation

Alerting

We’ve made major improvements to Grafana Alerts, from new contact points and search options to improved workflows between Alerting and OnCall. For all the details, refer to our Alerting documentation.

Alerting: alert rules

We’ve made the following changes to alert rules.

• Declare incidents from firing alerts

Declare an incident from a firing alert, streamlining the alert to incident workflow.

• Copy alert rules and notification templates

To help you reuse existing alert rules or templates, make copies of alert rules from the Alert rule list view and templates from the Contact points page.

• View query definitions for provisioned alerts

View read-only query definitions for provisioned alerts from the Alert rule details page. Check quickly if your alert rule queries are correct, without diving into your “as-code” repository for rule definitions.

• Export alert rules to use in the provisioning API or files

Create and tune an alert rule in the UI, then export to YAML or JSON, and use it in the provisioning API or files. You can also export an entire rule group to review or use. This is supported in both the UI and provisioning API.

• Pause alert rule evaluation

Pause alert rule evaluation to prevent noisy alerting while tuning your alerts. Pausing stops alert rule evaluation and does not create any alert instances. This is different to mute timings, which stop notifications from being delivered, but still allow for alert rule evaluation and the creation of alert instances.

• View an alert’s evaluation interval in Alert Group view

View the evaluation interval more easily from the grouped view on the Alert list page. The view now also always displays recording and normal alert rules and highlights alert rule status in different colors.

• Improved search for your alert rules

When managing large volumes of alerts, use extended alert rule search capabilities to filter folders, evaluation groups, and rules. Additionally, you can filter alert rules by their properties like labels, state, type, and health.

• Adjust the amount and resolution of data used in your alerting queries

Lower costs and improve performance by adjusting the maximum number of data points returned from your alerting queries.

• Edit alert rule evaluation interval

Simplifies editing the evaluation interval for an alert rule within a new group. You no longer have to save the alert rule and group before editing the evaluation interval.

Alerting: contact points

We’ve made the following changes to alert contact points.

• View Grafana OnCall contact point

Connecting your OnCall workflows just got easier. OnCall has been added as a contact point to simplify the integration between alert notifications and your OnCall implementation.

• Alert email templating

We’ve improved the design and functionality of email templates to make template creation much easier and more customizable. The email template framework utilizes MJML to define and compile the final email HTML output. Sprig functions in the email templates provide more customizable template functions.

• Add support for Discord as a contact point receiver

We’ve added Discord as a contact point receiver for Grafana Cloud alert rules.

Alerting: administration

We’ve made the following changes to alert administration.

• Alerting landing page

Introduces a new landing page that helps you get started quickly with Alerting. It also provides you with at a glance information on how Alerting works and a video to introduce you to key concepts.

• Compatibility with AWS Aurora

Grafana Alerting is now compatible with AWS Aurora, but does not provide technical support for it.

Enterprise Datasources

We’ve made improvements to all Enterprise Datasources, fixing small bugs, and updating libraries. We’ve also added many new features and support for additional APIs. Refer to each datasource’s documentation and the change log for additional information.

DataDog Datasource

We’ve added support for many new query types, including: SLO/SLI Values, RUM data, Events, and monitor group status.

Dynatrace Datasource

We’ve updated the Metric Selector to be faster and added support for filtering by management zone. We’ve also added support for Log Queries and querying the Dynatrace audit log.

GitLab Datasource

We’ve added support for many new query types, including: Audit events, Users, Merge request approvals, Field tags, Environments, and Pipelines.

Honeycomb Datasource

We’ve added support for derived columns and Honeycomb Environments.

NewRelic Datasource

We’ve added support for trace search, log search, and support for NRQL histogram queries.

Salesforce Datasource

We’ve added support for JWT authentication.

Snowflake Datasource

We’ve added support for custom session parameters.

Postgres, MySQL, and MSSQL data sources

The database property is now under the jsonData key in the data source configuration. This change is backward compatible, and existing configurations will continue to work.

Before you upgrade

There are no known breaking changes associated with this version of Grafana.

Original source