What’s new in Grafana Cloud

We’ve simplified the migration of data source-managed alert rules to Grafana-managed alert rules.

Using these tools and APIs, you can import data source-managed alert rules from Prometheus-compatible systems (Prometheus, Mimir, Loki) into Grafana as Grafana-managed alert rules. This simplifies migrating from data source alerts to Grafana Managed Alerts while preserving behavior of the rules. Alert rules can be imported from an easy-to-use UI tool or through API endpoints compatible with Mimirtool.

Flapping alerts can cause noise and obscure other issues. Now you can set the minimum amount of time that an alert remains firing after the breached threshold expression no longer returns any results. This sets an alert to a “Recovering” state for a duration of time so a re-triggered threshold incurred during this period won’t trigger a new alert.

Read the documentation for more information about how to set a “ Keep firing for” duration so you can use the Recovering state to eliminate unwanted noise.

You can now restore or permanently delete recently deleted Grafana-managed alert rules. Go to Alerts & IRM > Alerting > Recently deleted to see this function in action.

The table visualization panel just got a major performance boost. Load, sort, and filter large tables many times faster than before, now that the table visualization has been refactored to use the react-data-grid library.

Enhancements:

Performance: On a simulated large table of 41,400 rows and 17 columns, we see the following improvements:

If the feature flag for dynamic dashboards is enabled, once an existing dashboard is migrated to a dynamic dashboard and using schema v2, it can’t be migrated back. This issue will be solved in future versions of Grafana.

The issue only exists for self-managed users that want to roll back to a previous version of Grafana and users that provision dashboards as code. Grafana v12 has a mechanism to resolve both versions. 

We were double registering the existing metric cache_size. In Grafana v12 we’re deprecating the metric, with plans to remove it in Grafana v13, and splitting it into 2 different metrics:

• resource_cache_size
• query_cache_size

While available metrics are not officially documented, you may still use them to get information on the state of your instance.

Migration/mitigation

We’re removing the deprecated version of the UI extension APIs in favor of the new reactive APIs introduced in Grafana v11.4. The new APIs enable Grafana to load plugins with UI extensions lazily when needed instead of needing to load them prior to starting Grafana. They also make the UI reactive, so when the UI extensions registry changes, it will be reflected in the UI.

This affects plugin developers that are using UI extensions and haven’t migrated to the new APIs yet. Plugins trying to use the deprecated APIs in Grafana v12 throw an error.

Migration/mitigation

We’ve had a standard way to define UIDs for Grafana objects for several years. While all of our internal code complies to this format, we didn’t yet have strict enforcement of this format in REST APIs and provisioning paths that allow the creation and update of data sources.

In Grafana v11.2, we added a new failWrongDSUID feature toggle that is turned off by default. When enabled, the REST APIs and provisioning reject any requests to create or update data source instances that have an incorrect UID.

Use the full power of SQL to manipulate and combine results from data sources however you like. You can use it to create new dashboard visualizations and powerful alert and recording rules.

You can filter, do math, and join across different data source types at run time.

Aggregate by was introduced as a way to view RED metrics for your traces in the Tempo data source. This functionality has been deprecated since Grafana v11.3 in favor of using Traces Drilldown and the TraceQL metrics API, which offers much more functionality and complex features. Additionally, TraceQL metrics queries are significantly more powerful than what the metrics summary API provides.

Migration/mitigation

RED metrics are supported via Traces Drilldown and can be viewed with more advanced context than via the older metrics summary API. For all users, the aggregate by section will no longer be present in the Tempo data source search tab. Additionally, any user that had been using the aggregate by functionality in the Tempo data source in a dashboard can manually change the Tempo query.

Angular plugin support was deprecated and turned off by default in Grafana 11 and is now being removed Grafana v12. This means, effective in Grafana v12, there is no possibility anymore to use any Angular plugins in Grafana and the dashboards that were still using “core” Angular panels will be force-migrated to the latest versions that are using React.

For more information, refer to our blog post and documentation.

Actions were introduced as an optional property for the DataLinksContextMenu in October 2024 to support actions in the context menu for the table visualization. Actions were under a feature flag, so the impact is minimal. There’s no other way to use the property from other places that are using the DataLinksContextMenu component, so we expect the effect to be minimal.

If any, the impact would be that actions are not displayed in the context menu of the table visualization.

Migration/mitigation

Grafana Cloud has a page in the Admin section that displays feature toggles. A feature toggle is a way to enable or disable certain features before they are generally available. The feature toggle UI shows which toggles are on or off, with options to enable or disable some of those toggles. This UI is experimental.

We are removing this experimental page from Grafana Cloud since we are replacing our current feature toggle system with one that is more robust, and the new system is incompatible with the UI.

We are excited to announce SCIM user and group provisioning.

Previously, provisioned users needed to individually sign in to Grafana to exist within the platform, and administrators faced the time-consuming task of creating and managing teams - either manually or via provisioning. This process was complicated and often presented a bottleneck for new team members getting up and running quickly.

With this release we’re rethinking our dashboards APIs and introducing a new model that is consistent, versioned, and resource-oriented. We’re releasing them as experimental, with the intent to gather feedback and deliver a stable version to users with one of the next releases.

The new APIs make Git Sync possible, and are the key change that power our new Terraform provider and the creation of the GrafanaCTL CLI tool. Right now, only dashboards, folder, and other few elements like announcement banners and playlists are leveraging this new model, and we plan to expand it to all Grafana resources.