Grafana 11.2 release: new updates for data sources, visualizations, transformations, and more

The Grafana 11.2 release ushers in a new wave of Grafana data sources, updates to visualizations and transformations, and more capabilities in Grafana Alerting as well as authorization and authentication. Plus, for those who are looking to move from on-premises to cloud, there is a new migration assistant for Grafana Cloud in public preview.

For even more details about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog or the What’s New documentation.

Grafana’s big tent: all the latest data sources

New and improved Grafana data sources

As we continue adding to our growing catalog of more than 100 data sources, we remain committed to our “big tent” philosophy, which prioritizes software interoperability in Grafana. We’re excited to announce that we have rolled out the following data sources available in all editions of Grafana:

• Yugabyte: Visualize relational data from Yugabyte, the distributed SQL database.
• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus: Monitor and visualize metrics collected by Prometheus at scale using Amazon’s managed service.

More Enterprise data sources

We’ve also been steadily expanding our catalog of Enterprise data sources, which are fully supported by Grafana Labs and are available in Grafana Enterprise and across all tiers of Grafana Cloud, including our generous forever-free tier. Here are some of the new data sources you can use to query and visualize data:

• Atlassian Statuspage: Monitor the status and incident history of your services to keep stakeholders informed with real-time status updates.
• Drone: Visualize and monitor CI/CD pipeline statuses, build durations, and other key metrics from Drone.
• Netlify: Track site deployment statuses, build performance metrics, and overall site health from Netlify-hosted sites.
• Zendesk: Monitor and analyze customer support metrics, such as ticket volumes, response times, and customer satisfaction from Zendesk.
• Cloudflare: Track and analyze web traffic, security events, and performance metrics from your Cloudflare-protected sites.Cloudflare
• Azure CosmosDB: Visualize and query data stored in Azure CosmosDB
• Catchpoint: Monitor the performance of your web applications and services with real-time data from Catchpoint’s synthetic monitoring.
• Adobe Analytics: Visualize website traffic, user behavior, and conversion metrics from Adobe Analytics for data-driven marketing decisions.

To learn more, check out our guide to Enterprise data sources and our complete Enterprise data source catalog.

Public roadmap for Grafana data sources

We’re also excited to share a new public roadmap for data source plugins being built by the Grafana team, our partners, and our community. All existing and potential users of Grafana can now see our current plans and request new plugins, upvote existing requests, or comment with ideas and suggestions.

Updates for Grafana dashboards and visualizations

Canvas panel updates

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Standardized tooltips

As a continuation of our efforts to standardize tooltips across panels, we’ve updated Canvas panel 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 the Canvas panel so that you can add data links to Canvas panel 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 panel elements can also be configured to open with a single click. To enable this functionality, select Link under the 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.

To learn more, read our Canvas panel documentation.

State timeline supports pagination

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Until now, all your time series in a state timeline were designed to fit within a single window of the panel, which could make it hard to read. With this recent community contribution, the state timeline visualization now supports pagination thanks to the Page size option, which lets you paginate the state timeline visualization to limit how many series are visible at once.

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).

To learn more, read our state timeline documentation.

All the latest transformations in Grafana

Transformations are functions in Grafana that help you manipulate data results from a query before it’s applied to a visualization. Here are some of the latest improvements to transformations that come with Grafana 11.2.

Transpose data

The transpose function is a community contribution that pivots the data frame, converting rows to columns and columns to rows. This transformation comes in handy to switch the orientation of your data to better suit your visualization needs. (Note: If you have multiple data types, it will default to string type.)

This will be particularly useful when you might not be able to do preprocessing before visualization. For example, AWS Athena users cannot use PIVOT in queries.

To learn more, read our transpose documentation.

Template variable support

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.

Transformations promoted to GA

The following transformations are now generally available with the release of Grafana 11.2:

• Format string: This transformation provides a convenient way to standardize and tailor the presentation of string data for better visualization and analysis, such as formatting your string data to upper, lower, title case, and more.

• Cumulative and window calculations for Add field from calculation: The cumulative and window functions are two new types of calculations that you can run to generate a new field from your existing data.

  • The cumulative function calculates on the current row of data 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 (or 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.

• Group to nested table: This transformation allows you to easily group your table data by specified fields and perform calculations on each group, enhancing the depth and utility of your table visualizations.

To learn more, check out our transformations documentation and discover the different transformation functions you can perform on your data.

You can also learn 10 ways to get more out of your data with transformations and which 5 transformations a Grafana engineer recommends to get started.

Explore features in Grafana 11.2

Filter and pin logs

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 Grafana Loki

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

Explore now supports forward direction search for Grafana 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 learn more, read our Grafana documentation.

New in Grafana Alerting

Centralized view of alert history

With Grafana 11.2, it’s now possible to see the history of all alert events generated by your Grafana-managed alert rules from one centralized page.

With this unified view, you can quickly spot 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.

To learn more, read out Grafana Alerting documentation.

Organization mapping integration with OAuth providers

Generally available in Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise

With Grafana 11.2, you can 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, and we have worked closely with the community to make this functionality a reality.

For Generic OAuth and Okta, you can configure the claim (using the org_attribute_path setting) that contains the organizations to which the user belongs. 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 Grafana documentation for the OAuth provider you use. 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 SAML authentication 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 behind the feature flag ssoSettingsLDAP.

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

Migration assistant for Grafana Cloud

Available in public preview in Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise

Migrating from Grafana OSS or Grafana Enterprise 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. The tool securely handles the migration to Grafana Cloud 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 Grafana 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 Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant today and to begin your effortless transition to Grafana Cloud.

Learn more about Grafana 11.2

For an in-depth list of all the new features in Grafana 11.2, check out our Grafana documentation, the Grafana changelog, or our What’s New documentation.

Join the Grafana Labs community

We invite you to engage with the Grafana Labs community forums. Share your experiences with the new features, discuss best practices, and explore creative ways to integrate these updates into your workflows. Your insights and use cases are invaluable in enriching the Grafana ecosystem.

Upgrade to Grafana 11.2

Download Grafana 11.2 today or experience all the new features by signing up for Grafana Cloud, which offers an actually useful forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account today.

Our Grafana upgrade guide also provides step-by-step instructions for those looking to upgrade from an earlier version to ensure a smooth transition.

A special thanks to our community

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Grafana community!

Your contributions, ranging from pull requests to valuable feedback, are crucial in continually enhancing Grafana. And your enthusiasm and dedication inspire us at Grafana Labs to persistently innovate and elevate the Grafana platform.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!