What’s new in Grafana v12.0

Upgrade your Grafana experience with a direct connection with GitHub.

Connect your instance to a GitHub repository, and manage your dashboards as code directly from the Grafana UI. By enabling Git Sync, you will be able to manage dashboards the same way you manage your code. Dashboards will be versioned in Git, and edited through a PR workflow, so that it’s always possible to track changes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This brand new feature, coming to Public Preview in Grafana v12, is designed to streamline how you approach problem-solving by bringing all your relevant signals together in one unified view.

Centralized Signal Analysis for Efficient Investigations

• Add Panels from Any Signal: Investigations breaks down the silos between our Drilldown applications. You can now seamlessly add panels from Metrics, Logs, and Traces Drilldown directly into a single investigation view.
• Side-by-Side Comparison Across Time: Gain deeper insights by comparing the behavior of your signals across two distinct timeframes, all within the same view. This allows for the rapid identification of correlations and anomalies.
• Effortless Collaboration: Investigations make it easy to share your findings and the context of your analysis with other team members involved in the same task, fostering better collaboration and faster resolution.

Investigations provides a central hub to correlate and analyze diverse signals across the otherwise siloed Drilldown applications, leading to more efficient and effective troubleshooting.

Logs Drilldown now contains a JSON viewer for structured log lines. With this new feature, users can more easily view, interact, and of course drill down into their JSON data. This table enables users to filter their JSON log lines so that they can view just the data they need in places like the Log Volume visualization.

To learn more, refer to the following video demo, as well as the Grafana Logs Drilldown documentation.

We’re excited to announce that the Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant is now generally available to all users! After a successful public preview period, this powerful tool is ready to transform how self-managed Enterprise customers and OSS users transition to Grafana Cloud.

Simplifying Your Migration Journey

Last year, we migrated our dashboard architecture to the Scenes library, unlocking a more stable, dynamic, and flexible foundation for the future of Grafana dashboards. Today, we’re excited to showcase what the team has built on top of it, with a strong focus on improving core user workflows: navigating, consuming, and editing dashboards.

More efficient navigation and consumption

• Tabs for better organization: Build well-structured dashboards with tabbed layouts for different contexts and user groups.
• Conditional rendering: Show or hide visualizations based on variable selections or data availability, ensuring relevance. 
• Dashboard content outline: Navigate dashboards fast with this tree structure, making it easier to jump between sections.

Powerful dashboard editing

• New flexible panel layout options: Use custom or auto-grid panel layouts with adjustable settings, like column count, for adaptive dashboard behavior.
• Tabs and row grouping: Group panels into rows or tabs based on your needs. Nested grouping to support complex visual needs is also supported.
• Context-aware editing: Quickly modify tabs or rows, panels, and variables without diving into full edit mode.
• Intelligent side pane: The side pane user interface adapts to your selection, enabling fast actions like duplicating elements or setting layout options.

To try out dynamic dashboards, enable the dashboardNewLayouts feature toggle. Since this is still an experimental feature, we strongly recommend not using it in production environments yet.

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:

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.

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.

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.

We’re giving the community early access to several new experimental themes to celebrate the release of Grafana 12! You can jazz up your Grafana experience with Sapphire dusk, Tron, Gilded grove, Gloom, or Desert bloom. To see the color scheme of a theme before selecting it, click the user icon in the top-right corner of the page and select Change theme.

This opens the Change theme drawer, where you can view all themes:

Introducing new controls for Logs in Explore

We’re excited to introduce a new controls component for Logs in Explore, designed to make better use of the layout around logs, and give users greater flexibility when working with log data.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Since Grafana v10.2, the endpoint to check compatible versions when installing a plugin using grafana cli plugins install changed, which led to Grafana dependency versions no longer being taken into account. This might have led to the CLI installing plugins that are not fully compatible based on the plugins definition of compatibility via the grafanaDependency property in the plugin.json file.

The Grafana version check is re-enabled in Grafana v12 when installing plugins.

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.

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.