Grafana release cycle: end-of-year update

It’s been another big year for Grafana. In April, we unveiled Grafana 11.0 at GrafanaCon 2024, which introduced a queryless experience with Explore Metrics and custom visualizations with Canvas panels. Since then, we’ve made improvements to data sources and visualizations in our minor releases, and just last month the 11.3 release marked the general availability of Scenes-powered dashboards.

And now, as the end of the year approaches, we bring you some important Grafana release updates, including a new docs home for all things related to Grafana releases!

Grafana holiday season release freezes

Each year Grafana implements two release freezes to accommodate for the holiday season. This year our release freezes will be implemented as outlined below:

Freeze dates:

• Nov. 25, 2024 to Dec.2, 2024
• Dec. 19, 2024 to Jan. 2, 2025

Impacted products:

• Grafana in Grafana Cloud
• Grafana OSS
• Grafana Enterprise
• Grafana query service
• Multi-tenant data source services

During these times, no scheduled releases will be executed. However, this does not apply to changes that may be required during the course of an operational or security incident.

Grafana security releases: improved version naming convention

We’ve enhanced our naming convention for security release versions to make it easier to clearly identify our security releases from our standard patching releases.

In the past, critical vulnerabilities triggered unscheduled releases that incremented the patch version (e.g., 10.3.0 to 10.3.1). However, we found that the naming convention for these releases didn’t clearly communicate the nature of the update. For example, if there was a version change from 11.3.0 to 11.3.1, there was no indication whether it was a security fix, a bug fix, or a minor feature update. This lack of clarity led to confusion about the urgency and nature of the update.

Our new approach directly addresses this issue. Going forward, security releases will be appended with “+security” to indicate that the release is the indicated version PLUS the security fix.

For example: A release named “11.2.3+security-01” would consist of what was released in 11.2.3 PLUS the indicated security fix. Once released, the security fix will also then be automatically included in all future releases of the impacted version.

This naming convention should make it easier to identify security updates and the Grafana version they’re based on, allowing for a better understanding of the importance and urgency of each release.

Release information is now part of Grafana documentation

Blogs are great—they provide a space for us to communicate everything you need to know about Grafana Enterprise and Grafana OSS releases. But blogs come, and blogs go. So, in an effort to further improve your access to this information, you can now find release schedules, information, and updates (including those in this blog) in the “Upgrade Grafana” section of our documentation, under “Upgrade Strategies.”

We hope this further enhances your knowledge of Grafana releases. Thank you and happy holidays from the Grafana team!

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