What's new from Grafana Labs

Last October at ObsCon, we announced the GA of Logs Drilldown, and we’ve been hard at work expanding its capabilities to help you visualize your logs data with more flexibility and options.

Enhanced Visualization and Filtering Capabilities

• Multiple Include Filters: You can specify multiple inclusion filters within your Drilldown queries, allowing for more nuanced and targeted log retrieval.
• Regex Support: We’ve added support for regular expressions in label and field queries, providing robust and flexible pattern matching for in-depth log analysis.
• JSON Visualization: Explore and understand your JSON-formatted log entries with our new dedicated JSON visualization, making complex data structures easier to read and interpret.
• Service Selection Pagination: The service selection is now paginated, making it easier for users to view and discover service related data.
• Sort order changes query direction: Sort order and query direction are now linked, using a new query direction “Forward” from Loki. Setting “Oldest first” will query your log data in the order of oldest log to most recent. Setting “Newest first” will query your logs from a “Backwards” direction (i.e. newest log line to oldest).

With these new features in Logs Drilldown, we’re empowering you to gain clearer insights from your log data by supporting a wider range of formats and offering more powerful filtering and visualization options.

At ObsCon last October, we announced the GA of Metrics Drilldown, and we’ve been hard at work expanding its capabilities to help you reduce the number of metrics you need to manage with just a few clicks.

Faster Filtering

• Prefix and Suffix Filters: Refine your metric exploration with the new prefix and suffix filter options, enabling more precise targeting of the data you’re looking for.
• Group By Labels: Organize and understand your metrics more effectively by grouping them based on their labels. This provides valuable context and simplifies analysis.
• Sort Options: Tailor your view by sorting metrics based on recent history, associated dashboards, and related alerts. This allows you to prioritize and investigate efficiently.

Improved UI

• Collapsible Sidebar: We’ve introduced a collapsible sidebar, allowing you to focus on the data that matters most by providing more screen real estate for filtering.
• Better Metric Count: We now provide a real-time count of the metrics displayed after each filtering action, giving you immediate feedback on the impact of your selections.

With these enhancements to Metrics Drilldown, we continue our commitment to providing powerful tools to streamline your observability workflows and gain deeper insights into your systems.

Effective starting in Grafana 12.0, the configuration option editors_can_admin is removed. 

The editors_can_admin setting in Grafana allows users with the Editor role to create and manage Grafana Teams.  Editors in instances with this configuration setting no longer have these extra privileges.

Troubleshooting with traces just got a lot faster in Grafana Cloud. Trace correlations lets you configure custom, context-aware links straight into every span in the trace view. With a single click, you can now jump from a trace to:

• Logs filtered by the same trace or service fields
• Metrics focused on the exact service, endpoint, or error condition
• Profiles for CPU, memory, or heap snapshots tied to a span
• Dashboards, runbooks, tickets, or any external URL that enriches your workflow

All it takes is a quick rule in Correlations. Simply define which span or trace fields to use as variables, point to your target, and watch contextual links appear in the Explore trace view.

We are excited to announce the public preview of native histograms!

Native histograms are a metric type in Prometheus that can produce, store, and query high-resolution histograms of observations. They usually offer higher resolution and more straightforward instrumentation than classic histograms.

We’re excited to announce that k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are now generally available.

k6 browser checks allow you to go beyond traditional monitoring, enabling you to test and validate real user flows and gain insight into performance in ways you can’t with HTTP-level checks. With browser checks, you’re not just monitoring performance at a protocol level; you’re simulating user interactions that provide you with a much richer view of your app’s behavior in production.

You can define custom labels at the scrape job level across all services in a job, making it easier to:

• Attribute costs
• Track ownership
• Apply consistent metadata

Especially valuable for teams without direct access to AWS tagging, this feature:

• Centralizes label management
• Reduces duplication
• Removes the need for manual, error-prone configuration

You can now configure logs queries per-service and override the global configuration for services in Application Observability.

This feature allows you to change how service details query logs and facilitate traces to logs, providing the flexibility to mix and match signals across databases and datasources.

We keep making it easier to manage incidents from anywhere — no laptop needed!

With this latest update, you can now dive into the full incident timeline directly from your phone. Instantly catch up on everything that’s happened: comments, notes, attachments, and key activity — all organised chronologically.

We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) release of Grafana Traces Drilldown, bringing a simplified, queryless experience to distributed tracing analysis. Building on months of public preview feedback and lessons learned from the Drilldown suite, this GA release delivers a refined, integrated solution for deep-dive trace analysis.

Key highlights

• Queryless exploration made simple: Traces Drilldown eliminates the need to write complex queries. Users can instantly access granular trace-level insights directly from their dashboards. This “queryless” design allows you to effortlessly connect the RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) golden signals with precise trace details.
• Seamless navigation: Enjoy a smooth transition between the high-level trace overview and deep dive span views. This unified navigation experience ensures that you maintain context as you shift from summary views to detailed analysis. This advanced drilldown capability improves incident analysis by providing the contextual insight needed for faster root cause identification.
• Built-in investigative tools: The Traces Drilldown interface features integrated filtering, highlighting, breakdowns, comparisons, and root cause correlation. These built-in tools enable rapid trace assessment by quickly spotlighting abnormalities without the need for external analysis tools.
• Detailed trace visualization: Once you’ve narrowed down your traces of interest, the trace view high-fidelity spans timeline reveals key metadata, duration, and status indicators, helping you quickly identify the origin of performance bottlenecks and errors.
• Unified observability experience: Traces Drilldown connects traces with logs, metrics, and profiles for a cohesive observability workflow. Effortlessly transition from an anomaly in logs or metrics into detailed trace views, enabling you to inspect spans and duration breakdowns to swiftly uncover underlying issues.

What’s new for GA

Exemplars

Pipelines in Grafana Fleet Management can now inject variable collector attribute values into their configurations. This powerful new feature enables you to create dynamic configurations that adapt to each collector’s characteristics, reducing the need for multiple similar pipelines.

Categorize your collectors with meaningful attributes, such as environment type, department, or location. Then inject these attributes into configuration pipelines using the syntax argument.attributes.value["ATTRIBUTE_KEY"]. With attribute injection, you can

• Create a single pipeline that works across different environments.
• Dynamically set labels based on collector attributes.
• Reduce the number of pipelines needed to manage your fleet.
• Make configurations more maintainable and scalable.

We’ve made several updates to the IRM settings to give administrators greater visibility and control:

• Renamed the Organization settings to Admin & API.
• Added Admin-level setting to enable or disable the availability of notification channels (such as Slack or MS Teams) across all user profiles.
• Deprecated OnCall API tokens in favor of Grafana Cloud service accounts. Existing OnCall API tokens can still be used, viewed, and deleted, but new tokens can no longer be generated.

We’ve made it easier to understand ownership and take action immediately when a service looks off. The latest update to Grafana Service Center brings IRM (incident response management) context directly into the service details view. You can now quickly see who’s on-call and escalate issues without leaving Service Center.

When a team is assigned to a service and has an active on-call schedule, the service details page shows:

• Who is currently on call
• Their local time and whether they’re within working hours
• Quick-access actions like Slack DM and escalation

Grafana’s dashboard schema has stayed mostly the same for years, originally built around a single grid layout. Over time, it became more complex and harder to work with, mixing different concerns and adding unnecessary complications. In Grafana v12, we’re introducing a new dashboard schema.

With this new architecture based on Scenes, we’re simplifying the schema to make it easier to understand and support powerful new features, like dynamic dashboards, tabs, and canvas-style layouts. The new schema also aims to simplify dashboard management, supporting the as-code approach of Git provisioning.

In the middle of an incident? Deploying a service? Would having every log line available help?

Now with Pause Adaptive Logs, end users of logs can temporarily ingest the logs they need for the service, application, or cluster they care about, without needing to configure anything in Adaptive Logs or work with their centralized team. Get all the cost savings benefits of Adaptive Logs, while making sure your dev teams aren’t stranded during an Incident!