What’s new in Grafana v13.3

Grafana’s biggest visual refresh since v7 now in public preview

It’s been a long time since Grafana’s UI has had a real facelift. Today, we’re excited to give you a first proper look at our visual refresh: a new color system, typography, and theme that’s about to enter public preview. It’s the biggest visual modernization effort we’ve undertaken since Grafana v7.

You can now undo Grafana Assistant’s latest dashboard changes with a click. If you try a different layout or visualization and prefer what you had before, you can restore it and keep experimenting.

Dashboard plans, now in public preview, let you review and refine a proposed dashboard before Grafana Assistant builds it. Describe what you want to monitor, and the Assistant presents a plan in chat that includes the dashboard title, tabs or rows, panels, visualization types, and variables.

When multiple dashboards use the same variable, creating and maintaining it separately in each dashboard can lead to duplicated work and inconsistent configuration. Cross-dashboard variables let you define a variable once and reuse it across multiple dashboards in your Grafana organization.

Create and manage cross-dashboard variables from Dashboards > Variables. You can scope a variable in either of two ways:

• Global: Available to all dashboards in the organization.
• Folder: Available only to dashboards in the same folder.

Bring dashboard panels, Explore queries, and Grafana Assistant findings into one editable notebook. Add your reasoning alongside the evidence, then share it so teammates can understand how you reached your conclusions.

Different readers need different things from a report. An executive may want clean pages that put the panels first, while a client expects your branding and page numbers throughout.

Custom PDF headers and footers let you shape your reports around the people who read them. Decide what the header shows, build a footer from the pieces you need, and style the text to suit your audience.

The Thresholds panel option now supports variable interpolation to help you quickly update thresholds in dashboard panels.

Simply type the your variable name (for example, `$my-var`) into a thresholds step input and manage it through the variable toggle on the dashboard.

Your team reads runbooks, architecture notes, and contribution guidelines in Grafana, right next to the dashboards they describe. Git Sync shows every Markdown file in a provisioned folder as its own tab, with Mermaid diagrams rendered in place.

Build transformation pipelines that keep working when your queries change. Transformations like Merge series/tables, Join by field, Join by labels, Series to rows, and Reduce (except in Reduce fields mode) build the refId of their output from the refIds of their input, for example merge-A-B. When you add, remove, or rename a query, or a query returns no data, that generated refId changes, and any later transformation that filters on it stops matching.

Sort your data the way you think about it. Tables are easier to read and compare when they follow the order you’d use to explain them: by team, then by score within each team, then by name. The Sort by transformation now supports multiple sort fields, so you can build exactly that order.

We’ve enhanced the panel errors icon functionality to provide more information around query errors and notices.

This update brings three significant updates. First, the icon is dynamic reflecting the highest severity notice on a panel. Second, when you hover your cursor over the icon, there’s a new tooltip showing all the panel errors, sorted by severity:

We’ve recently extended support for cross-filtering, bringing support to:

• Histogram
• State timeline
• Status History

This is in addition to the previously supported visualizations, bar chart, table, and time series.

When a panel title needs more explanation, you can now display its description as a subtitle directly beneath it. This keeps context visible as you read the dashboard, helping you understand what a metric measures or how to interpret a chart.

Panel time settings and time comparison are now generally available.

The Panel time settings drawer brings a panel’s time options together in one place. Open the panel menu and select Time settings to override the dashboard time range for a single panel, shift that panel’s window, or compare its data against an earlier period, all without entering dashboard edit mode. When you configure these settings, they appear in the panel header.

Text visualizations are useful for adding context to dashboards, but the core visualization has traditionally been limited to static Markdown, HTML, and dashboard variables. If you wanted to create a table from query results, display a status summary, or change text based on a value, you often had to use custom code or another visualization type.

The updated text visualization connects text to your query data, allowing you to build data-driven tables, cards, lists, and status summaries directly in Grafana.

Moving alert rules from Mimir and Prometheus to Grafana previously meant manually rebuilding their notification setup in Grafana. Now you can import your existing Prometheus or Mimir Alertmanager configuration alongside your alert rules—bringing routing and notification settings with you instead of recreating them from scratch.

You can now improve your alert rule quality with the Alert Advisor. Alert rules are easier to act on when they carry the right context, like a runbook URL to guide investigation or a team label to route notifications. With the Alert Advisor in Grafana, you can:

• Define which labels and annotations are required for Grafana-managed alert rules.
• Find rules with missing required labels or annotations and update them.
• Optionally enforce selected requirements on supported provisioning writes.

Managing alert rules in Prometheus, Mimir, and Loki is moving into a dedicated Grafana app plugin, Prometheus Alerting. The plugin is built around how those systems actually work. It manages rule groups and namespaces in a Prometheus-compatible ruler, along with routes, receivers, templates, silences, time intervals, and inhibition rules in an external Alertmanager.

With the plugin installed and the hand-off enabled, Grafana routes data source managed alerting URLs to the matching page in the plugin. Shared links, bookmarks, and in-product links keep working — they land in the plugin instead of the core alerting UI. Grafana-managed alerting stays in core, and both experiences run side by side in the same Grafana instance.

Announcement banners allow Grafana administrators to share status updates to their users, for example when there is an ongoing incident or scheduled maintenance. Particularly for more informational updates, users often wanted a way to acknowledge and dismiss the banner so it was no longer in the way. Now that is possible. Administrators can optionally toggle whether a banner is dismissible by a user. A banner stays dismissed across all sessions and browser windows, unless an administrator updates the banner - in which case it reappears.

If you have the required permissions to manage roles or role assignments, you can revoke access without holding the permissions being removed. This applies when you update or delete a role, or remove role assignments through the /api/access-control/ APIs.

If you delegate role management, review who should have this broader revocation authority, as outlined in the advance notice.