What’s new in Grafana v13.2

Storing a service account JSON key file to connect Grafana Cloud to Google Cloud is a persistent security liability. Keys get embedded in config files, shared across teams, or quietly forgotten — all while remaining valid for years. When one leaks, there’s no automatic expiry and no limited blast radius.

The BigQuery and Google Cloud Monitoring data source plugins support Google Cloud Workload Identity Federation (WIF) as an authentication method on Grafana Cloud. Instead of uploading a key file, Grafana Cloud exchanges the signed-in user’s OIDC token for a short-lived Google Cloud access token via the Security Token Service. Credentials are scoped to the active session and expire automatically — no keys to store, rotate, or accidentally expose.

We redesigned the query variable editor with a new editing experience that makes working with query variables easier.

The new experience uses a dialog box with the values preview at the top and a tabbed editor below, so you can review results while you edit. The wider dialog box also provides plenty of space to work without so that you don’t have to do as much scrolling to see all the query settings.

Organizing a dashboard is now faster with multi-select grouping. In edit mode, you can select multiple panels at once and instantly group them into a row or a tab, making it easy to restructure dashboards without moving panels one by one.

Saved queries is now generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud, making it easier to discover, reuse, and share queries across your organization.

This release also introduces two major enhancements: the ability to access saved queries directly from the command palette for faster discovery, and to provision saved queries with Terraform to manage them as code. Together, these updates make saved queries easier to find, easier to manage, and easier to incorporate into your everyday workflow.

We’ve applied a fresh coat of paint to the Grafana homepage and added a couple of new features while we’re there.

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.

We’ve enhanced the panel errors icon 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. Lastly we’ve added a new Errors and Notices tab in the panel inspector drawer to better view the results.

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 graph packs in dozens of series, understanding which ones share an anomaly means visually tracing overlapping lines. Plus, if you’re a viewer, you can’t toggle the legend or stacking to get a clearer look, because those options live in edit mode.

When you edit a dashboard that uses auto layout, Grafana manages panel sizes automatically. Until now, it wasn’t always clear why dragging the lower-right corner of a panel had no effect or how to change the layout.

Selecting an OpenSearch index just got easier with the new Index Picker.

Finding and setting the right index in the Grafana OpenSearch plugin no longer means typing index names from memory. The query editor now includes a Select index button that opens a searchable browser of the indices available on your data source. Each index is shown alongside its document count and cluster health, so you can pick the right one at a glance. Search by substring, use * and ? for wildcards, or wrap your input in /…/ for a full regex match to quickly narrow down large clusters.

Connecting to Oracle just got easier with Easy Connect Plus.

Setting up an Oracle data source in Grafana no longer means wrangling a tnsnames.ora file or spelling out a full connection descriptor. The Oracle plugin now supports Easy Connect Plus, a third connection method that encodes the host, port, and service name in a single string. Just enter something like host:port/service and you’re connected. The port is optional and defaults to 1521, so myhost/orclpdb1 works too.

The Azure Monitor data source now supports the Azure Monitor Metrics Batch API. Instead of sending one request per resource, Grafana groups eligible metric queries and sends them together. This means fewer calls to Azure, faster queries, and less chance of throttling on dashboards that query many resources.

Git Sync now supports GitHub Enterprise, both Server and Cloud versions.

You can now provision your dashboards as JSON files and your folders in your GitHub enterprise instance using Git Sync. If you make any changes in your synchronized Git repositories, they will be updated in the Grafana database as well, and vice-versa. This allows you to manage your resources as code, so you and your team can version control, collaborate, and automate deployments efficiently.

Starting in Grafana 13.2.0, you can include authoring information to your commits.

If you don’t enable commit signing, you can use author override to author commits. If you don’t select author override, the signed-in Grafana user name and email will be used as the commit author.

In Grafana OSS/Enterprise, Git Sync uses webhooks to enable real-time updates from GitHub public repositories, or to enable pull request integrations. Webhooks are now available for GitLab and BitBucket.

When you operate Grafana yourself and have to troubleshoot performance issues, distributed traces are often the quickest way to see what’s going on under the hood. Until now, collecting them meant standing up an OpenTelemetry Collector and a tracing backend just to investigate a single issue.