Grafana 7.5 released: Loki alerting and label browser for logs, next-generation pie chart, and more!

Grafana v7.5 has been released!

This is the last stable release before we launch Grafana 8.0 at GrafanaCONline in June. Register for free now, so you won’t miss the great sessions we’re planning around all things Grafana. And if you’re doing something special with Grafana that you’d like to share with the community, the CFP for GrafanaCONline is open until 06:59 UTC on April 10!

Now, back to 7.5. While it’s a small release, there are some great features you should know about.

Pie charts

Pie charts were a popular feature request for Grafana from almost the beginning of the project. (They’ve also sometimes been maligned While we introduced a basic pie chart panel a few years ago, it was never a built-in visualization option for Grafana.

With 7.5, we’re introducing a new and improved pie chart panel (beta), and it’s now a first-class citizen in the Grafana visualization library. The panel is a complete rewrite, with standard styling, legends, overrides, and fields in line with the other built-in visualizations.

You can read more about the pie chart panel in the docs.

Alerting support for Loki

If you’re a Loki user, Grafana 7.5 brings some good news: There’s now alerting support for Loki! LogQL, the Loki query language, allows you to create metrics out of logs, and 7.5 enables you to create alerts on these Loki metric queries.

Loki label browser

Previously, in order to find your log streams in the query editor, you would have to scroll through a drop-down list of labels. As your Loki installation grows, the list of labels and sub-labels could be increasingly challenging to navigate. To make it easier for you to find your Loki logs, we built the new Logs browser, which allows you to construct a query with labels and values of your choice.

Grafana Tempo added as a backend data source

Tempo has been converted to a backend data source, which means that there is no longer support for tempo-query’s Jaeger response. Simply point to the port that is set in the Tempo configuration file to configure the data source.

Better format definition for trace data 

As of 7.5, data for the trace view is sent from the data source with a clear format, which aligns with how Grafana represents other data. As a result, plugin developers can more easily leverage the trace view in their data sources. You can read more about this in the trace data API docs.

Word highlighting for Elasticsearch

When you search for text in Elasticsearch logs, the matching words are now highlighted in the log lines that are returned by the query.

Paste in SSL certs for setting up the Postgres data source

Instead of having to put the certification on the server and configure the data source with file path, you can now paste the SSL certification content in the UI when setting up the Postgres data source. This feature brings the Postgres data source to parity with MySQL. 

Cloudwatch data source enhancements

A number of improvements have been made to the Cloudwatch data source — many thanks to community contributors relvira, ilyastoli, and rubycut! Additions include: 

• Support for region eu-south-1. 
• New metrics for the namespaces AWS/Timestream, AWS/RDS (RDS Proxy metrics), AWS/NetworkFirewall, AWS/GroundStation, and AWS/DDoSProtection. 
• A page limit to the List Metrics API call to improve speed and reduce memory consumption.
• The ability to enable or disable authentication providers and assume a role other than default by changing the allowed_auth_providers and assume_role_enabled options in the Grafana configuration file.
• The ability to specify a custom endpoint in the configuration page, which can reduce request latency. 

Read more about these changes in the AWS Cloudwatch data source docs.

Query caching in Grafana Enterprise

Having Grafana temporarily store the results of data source queries enables faster dashboard load times, reduces API costs, and lowers the likelihood that APIs will rate-limit or throttle requests. This much-requested feature now works for all backend data sources. You can read more about this feature in the docs.

Support for template variables in Grafana Enterprise reports

If you’re creating reports from a dashboard that uses template variables, you can now choose specific values that will be rendered in each report. This makes it easier to tailor reports and generate multiple versions from the same dashboard. You can read more about this 7.5 feature in the reporting docs.

Grafana Enterprise active user limits

If you exceed the number of active users allowed in your Grafana Enterprise license, then new or non-active users won’t be able to sign in to your instance. (Active users are defined as users who have logged into Grafana in the past 30 days.) You should have received detailed information from your customer success manager, but you can also read more about the limits in the licensing documentation.

Changelog

Check out CHANGELOG.md for a complete list of new features, changes, and bug fixes.

Upgrade Grafana

Download or try Grafana 7.5 in the cloud today. 

The easiest way to get started with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki for logging, and Tempo for tracing is Grafana Cloud, and we’ve recently added a new free plan and upgraded our paid plans. If you’re not already using Grafana Cloud, sign up today for free and see which plan meets your use case.

Refer to Upgrading for more information about upgrading your Grafana installation.

Interested in getting started with Grafana? Watch this webinar for a demo of the user interface and setup.

Thanks

A big thanks to all the Grafana users who contributed by submitting PRs, bug reports, and feedback!