What's new from Grafana Labs

Grafana is moving to /apis, an API layer that powers the App Platform and gives us a more consistent, scalable foundation going forward. With Grafana 13, we are officially deprecating the /api path in favor of the new /apis path. Deprecating /api marks our commitment to this new model.

Git Sync is now generally available for all Grafana Cloud and self-managed Grafana users.

Connect your Grafana instance to GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or any git repository to manage dashboards as code. You can edit dashboards directly in Grafana and then save, commit, and open a pull request without leaving the UI.

Adaptive Logs Drop rules allow you precisely define noisy or wasteful logs to drop, and can be used in addition to our own optimization recommendations. Use cases for drop rules include filtering out debug logs, dropping health check log lines, or downsampling in non-production environments.

Writing a solid k6 performance test still means juggling URLs, VU counts, checks, thresholds, and how metrics will look in Grafana after the run. It is easy to get stuck on a blank script or to ship something that runs locally but does not match how your service actually behaves in production.

The new Graphviz panel plugin lets you define interactive diagrams in the Graphviz DOT language, and map live data to them from any data source.

Go beyond the visual query builder in Elasticsearch with a new raw query editor and support for two query languages: Elasticsearch Query DSL and ES|QL.

Grafana v13.0 upgrades the core application from React 18 to React 19. The SceneViewer panel in the IoT TwinMaker app (grafana-iot-twinmaker-app) depends on React APIs removed in React 19 and will fail to render after upgrading.               

Drilling down into your data across a dashboard has traditionally meant working with basic filter controls, re-entering the same filters you used yesterday, and losing track of which filters are active when many are applied. Introducing the new Filter and Group by dashboard control to tackle all of these friction points and make dashboard exploration faster and more intuitive.

SQL Expressions let you combine and transform data across multiple queries using familiar SQL-joining results, computing ratios, and filtering before aggregating. But to use it, you had to know the feature existed, learn that your query names become table names, and get the MySQL-dialect syntax right yourself.

In Grafana 12.2.0, we introduced two new settings for controlling audit log emission for data source queries: log_datasource_query_request_body and log_datasource_query_response_body, which logs the request and response body payloads respectively.

Styling panels in Grafana used to require a lot of manual work: editing each panel individually, or duplicating one just to reuse its look and then swapping out the query. With the new copy-paste styles feature, you can copy the styling from one panel and apply it to another in just a couple of clicks.

Data source APIs that referenced data sources using a numeric id were deprecated in Grafana v9.0 in favor of APIs that reference data sources using a uid instead. In Grafana v13.0, these deprecated APIs are disabled by default.

Grafana Advisor is now generally available in Grafana v13.0.

You can use Advisor to uncover issues affecting the health of your Grafana instances, such as:

• Data sources with a failing health check that will result in failed queries
• Outdated plugins, which might be insecure or lacking the latest fixes and features
• Misconfigured SSO settings

Checks run once a week by default and can be triggered manually from the Advisor home page. You can also configure alerts to inform you when new issues arise.

The following Prometheus metrics are now deprecated in Grafana v13, and will be removed in a future release:

• go_sql_stats_connections_max_open
• go_sql_stats_connections_open
• go_sql_stats_connections_in_use
• go_sql_stats_connections_idle
• go_sql_stats_connections_waited_for
• go_sql_stats_connections_blocked_seconds
• go_sql_stats_connections_closed_max_idle
• go_sql_stats_connections_closed_max_lifetime
• go_sql_stats_connections_closed_max_idle_time
• grafana_database_conn_max_open
• grafana_database_conn_open
• grafana_database_conn_in_use
• grafana_database_conn_idle
• grafana_database_conn_wait_count_total
• grafana_database_conn_wait_duration_seconds
• grafana_database_conn_max_idle_closed_total
• grafana_database_conn_max_idle_closed_seconds
• grafana_database_conn_max_lifetime_closed_total

They are replaced by the following metrics, which provide the exact same data:

• go_sql_max_open_connections
• go_sql_open_connections
• go_sql_in_use_connections
• go_sql_idle_connections
• go_sql_wait_count_total
• go_sql_wait_duration_seconds_total
• go_sql_max_idle_closed_total
• go_sql_max_idle_time_closed_total
• go_sql_max_lifetime_closed_total

We previously announced in a blog post that the Grafana Image Renderer plugin was deprecated back in September 2025.

Starting from Grafana 13, support for the plugin is fully removed and it no longer works for rendering screenshots or scheduled reports.