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Grafana 2021: Year in review

Grafana 2021: Year in review

December 28, 2021 5 min

Numbers don’t lie — and the data shows that in a year in which we, once again, endured unpredictable changes, Grafana experienced unparalleled success with:

  • 374 Grafana contributors
  • 7,000 PRs for Grafana OSS
  • 22 new plugins published
  • 293 plugins updated
  • 42 million plugins downloaded

In June, we introduced Grafana 8.0, which included unified alerting, new visualizations, real-time streaming, and more. Since then we have introduced a host of new features as well as new data source plugins that only reinforce Grafana’s commitment to our “big tent” philosophy

Here is a recap of the new features, plugins, and integrations that were added to Grafana this year. We can’t wait to collaborate with the Grafana community and see what the new year will bring! 

Grafana releases and features

Grafana 8.3 released: Recorded queries, panel suggestions, new panels, added security, and more

New in Grafana 8.2: Test contact points for alerts before they fire

Grafana 8.2 released: Dynamic plugin catalog, new fine-grained access control permissions, and more

New in Grafana 8.1: Gradient mode for Time series visualizations and dynamic panel configuration

What’s new in Grafana 8.1: Geomap panel 

Streaming real-time sensor data to Grafana using MQTT and Grafana Live

Grafana 8.1 released: New Geomap and Annotations panels, updated plugin management, and more

New in Grafana 8.0: Streaming real-time events and data to dashboards

The new unified alerting system for Grafana: Everything you need to know

Grafana 8.0: Unified Grafana and Prometheus alerts, live streaming, new visualizations, and more

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

New in Grafana 7.4: Export usage data to Loki to help manage dashboard sprawl and troubleshoot faster

You should know about… transformations in Grafana

How the new time series panel brings major performance improvements and new visualization features to Grafana 7.4

Grafana 7.4 released: Next-generation graph panel with 30 fps live streaming, 

Prometheus exemplar support, trace to logs, and more

The new Grafana Cloud: the only composable observability stack for metrics,

 logs, and traces, now with free and paid plans to suit every use case

Grafana data source plugins and integrations

Monitor all your Redshift clusters in Grafana with the new Amazon Redshift data source plugin

Introducing the Sentry data source plugin for Grafana

Identify operational issues quickly by using Grafana and Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights

Query and analyze Amazon S3 data with the new Amazon Athena plugin for Grafana

Introducing the AWS CloudWatch integration, Grafana Cloud’s first fully managed integration

The 18 most popular data source plugins for Grafana in 2021

Introducing new integrations to make it easier to monitor Vault with Grafana 

With the Salesforce plugin for Grafana, easily visualize your SFDC data and correlate it with other data sources

How to use AWS IoT SiteWise Edge and Grafana to collect and monitor industrial data on-premises

Introducing the Lightstep Metrics plugin for Grafana

Introducing the Honeycomb plugin for Grafana

How we’re working with the Elastic team to make the Elasticsearch data source for Grafana even more powerful

New in the Google Cloud Monitoring data source plugin for Grafana: sample dashboards, deep linking, more

Monitor key metrics and visitor demographics in NGINX with the new Grafana Cloud integration

Visualize Humio logs alongside your other data sources in Grafana Cloud with the new plugin for Grafana

Monitor and alert on essential RabbitMQ cluster metrics with the new Grafana Cloud integration

New plugins connect almost all of Redis for monitoring and visualization in Grafana

What’s new in the updated Strava plugin for Grafana

Easily monitor and alert on your Kubernetes clusters with the new Grafana Cloud integration

Get instant Grafana dashboards for Prometheus metrics with the Elixir PromEx library

Easily monitor your Tencent Cloud services with the new Grafana plugin

Want to visualize software development insights with Grafana? With our new Jira Enterprise plugin, you can!

Troubleshoot problems using GitLab activity data with the new plugin for Grafana

The new Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring plugin brings the SaaS formerly known as SignalFx to your Grafana dashboards

The Splunk plugin for Grafana now supports data links for jumping directly from logs to traces

Webinars and talks

How to connect and monitor your Raspberry Pi with Grafana

Easy DIY IoT projects with Grafana

Intro to metrics with Grafana: Prometheus, Graphite, and beyond

Unite your end-to-end observability workflow beneath Grafana’s first pane of glass

Intro to the Grafana Stack: Correlate your metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana

Grafana plugins demo: GitLab, JIRA, ServiceNow, and more

Intro to unified alerting in Grafana

Getting started with Grafana dashboard design

Getting started with Grafana 8.0

Grafana 8.0 deep dive

Community stories

Visualizing IoT security metrics with Grafana at Network to Code

“Open source done right”: Why Canonical adopted Grafana, Loki, and Grafana Agent for their new stack

How Sitech builds modern industrial IoT monitoring solutions on Grafana Cloud

With Grafana and InfluxDB, CSS Electronics visualizes CAN IoT data to monitor vehicles and machinery

How BasisAI uses Grafana to monitor model drift in machine learning workloads

How to use Grafana and Prometheus to Rickroll your friends (or enemies)

How Pernod Ricard uses Grafana and Loki to scale and monitor its global e-commerce business

How astronomers use Grafana dashboards to read the stars (and their data) on the SOFIA airborne observatory

How Salesforce manages service health at scale with Grafana and Prometheus

Monitoring UV sensors on the International Space Station with Grafana

Using Grafana, academics created a next-level dashboard tracking the impact of Covid-19 in Romania

How Siemens uses IoT sensor data and Grafana to optimize train maintenance, capacity, and more

How PayIt, a secure cloud service provider for digital government, uses Grafana and Prometheus for observability at cloud native scale

How using Grafana (and plugins) gave a jolt to Smart State Technology, a company advancing technology for energy infrastructures

IoT monitoring with Grafana: How Eurac observes climate change in the Alps