Guides on Grafana Labs

Basic Concepts

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

Basic Concepts

This document is a “bottom up” introduction to basic concepts in Grafana, and can be used as a starting point to get familiar with core features.

Data Source

Grafana supports many different storage backends for your time series data (Data Source). Each Data Source has a specific Query Editor that is customized for the features and capabilities that the particular Data Source exposes.

The following datasources are officially supported: Graphite, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch.

The query language and capabilities of each Data Source are obviously very different. You can combine data from multiple Data Sources onto a single Dashboard, but each Panel is tied to a specific Data Source that belongs to a particular Organization.

Organization

Grafana supports multiple organizations in order to support a wide variety of deployment models, including using a single Grafana instance to provide service to multiple potentially untrusted Organizations.

In many cases, Grafana will be deployed with a single Organization.

Each Organization can have one or more Data Sources.

All Dashboards are owned by a particular Organization.

Note: It is important to remember that most metric databases do not provide any sort of per-user series authentication. Therefore, in Grafana, Data Sources and Dashboards are available to all Users in a particular Organization.

For more details on the user model for Grafana, please refer to Admin

User

A User is a named account in Grafana. A user can belong to one or more Organizations, and can be assigned different levels of privileges through roles.

Grafana supports a wide variety of internal and external ways for Users to authenticate themselves. These include from its own integrated database, from an external SQL server, or from an external LDAP server.

For more details please refer to User Auth

Row

A Row is a logical divider within a Dashboard, and is used to group Panels together.

Rows are always 12 “units” wide. These units are automatically scaled dependent on the horizontal resolution of your browser. You can control the relative width of Panels within a row by setting their own width.

We utilize a unit abstraction so that Grafana looks great on all screens both small and huge.

Note: With MaxDataPoint functionality, Grafana can show you the perfect amount of datapoints no matter your resolution or time-range.

Utilize the Repeating Row functionality to dynamically create or remove entire Rows (that can be filled with Panels), based on the Template variables selected.

Rows can be collapsed by clicking on the Row Title. If you save a Dashboard with a Row collapsed, it will save in that state and will not preload those graphs until the row is expanded.

Panel

The Panel is the basic visualization building block in Grafana. Each Panel provides a Query Editor (dependent on the Data Source selected in the panel) that allows you to extract the perfect visualization to display on the Panel by utilizing the Query Editor

There are a wide variety of styling and formatting options that each Panel exposes to allow you to create the perfect picture.

Panels can be dragged and dropped and rearranged on the Dashboard. They can also be resized.

There are currently four Panel types: Graph, Singlestat, Dashlist, Table,and Text.

Panels like the Graph panel allow you to graph as many metrics and series as you want. Other panels like Singlestat require a reduction of a single query into a single number. Dashlist and Text are special panels that do not connect to any Data Source.

Panels can be made more dynamic by utilizing Dashboard Templating variable strings within the panel configuration (including queries to your Data Source configured via the Query Editor).

Utilize the Repeating Panel functionality to dynamically create or remove Panels based on the Templating Variables selected.

The time range on Panels is normally what is set in the Dashboard time picker but this can be overridden by utilizes Panel specific time overrides.

Panels (or an entire Dashboard) can be Shared easily in a variety of ways. You can send a link to someone who has a login to your Grafana. You can use the Snapshot feature to encode all the data currently being viewed into a static and interactive JSON document; it’s so much better than emailing a screenshot!

Query Editor

The Query Editor exposes capabilities of your Data Source and allows you to query the metrics that it contains.

Use the Query Editor to build one or more queries (for one or more series) in your time series database. The panel will instantly update allowing you to effectively explore your data in real time and build a perfect query for that particular Panel.

You can utilize Template variables in the Query Editor within the queries themselves. This provides a powerful way to explore data dynamically based on the Templating variables selected on the Dashboard.

Grafana allows you to reference queries in the Query Editor by the row that they’re on. If you add a second query to graph, you can reference the first query simply by typing in #A. This provides an easy and convenient way to build compounded queries.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is where it all comes together. Dashboards can be thought of as of a set of one or more Panels organized and arranged into one or more Rows.

The time period for the Dashboard can be controlled by the Dashboard time picker in the upper right of the Dashboard.

Dashboards can utilize Templating to make them more dynamic and interactive.

Dashboards can utilize Annotations to display event data across Panels. This can help correlate the time series data in the Panel with other events.

Dashboards (or a specific Panel) can be Shared easily in a variety of ways. You can send a link to someone who has a login to your Grafana. You can use the Snapshot feature to encode all the data currently being viewed into a static and interactive JSON document; it’s so much better than emailing a screenshot!

Dashboards can be tagged, and the Dashboard picker provides quick, searchable access to all Dashboards in a particular Organization.

Getting Started

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

Getting started

This guide will help you get started and acquainted with Grafana. It assumes you have a working Grafana server up and running and have added at least one Data Source.

Beginner guides

Watch the 10min beginners guide to building dashboards to get a quick intro to setting up Dashboards and Panels.

Basic Concepts

Read the Basic Concepts document to get a crash course in key Grafana concepts.

Let’s start with creating a new Dashboard. You can find the new Dashboard link at the bottom of the Dashboard picker. You now have a blank Dashboard.

The image above shows you the top header for a Dashboard.

Side menubar toggle: This toggles the side menu, allowing you to focus on the data presented in the dashboard. The side menu provides access to features unrelated to a Dashboard such as Users, Organizations, and Data Sources.
Dashboard dropdown: This dropdown shows you which Dashboard you are currently viewing, and allows you to easily switch to a new Dashboard. From here you can also create a new Dashboard, Import existing Dashboards, and manage Dashboard playlists.
Star Dashboard: Star (or unstar) the current Dashboard. Starred Dashboards will show up on your own Home Dashboard by default, and are a convenient way to mark Dashboards that you’re interested in.
Share Dashboard: Share the current dashboard by creating a link or create a static Snapshot of it. Make sure the Dashboard is saved before sharing.
Save dashboard: The current Dashboard will be saved with the current Dashboard name.
Settings: Manage Dashboard settings and features such as Templating and Annotations.

Dashboards, Panels, Rows, the building blocks of Grafana…

Dashboards are at the core of what Grafana is all about. Dashboards are composed of individual Panels arranged on a number of Rows. Grafana ships with a variety of Panels. Grafana makes it easy to construct the right queries, and customize the display properties so that you can create the perfect Dashboard for your need. Each Panel can interact with data from any configured Grafana Data Source (currently InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Prometheus and Cloudwatch). The Basic Concepts guide explores these key ideas in detail.

Adding & Editing Graphs and Panels

You add panels via row menu. The row menu is the green icon to the left of each row.
To edit the graph you click on the graph title to open the panel menu, then Edit.
This should take you to the Metrics tab. In this tab you should see the editor for your default data source.

When you click the Metrics tab, you are presented with a Query Editor that is specific to the Panel Data Source. Use the Query Editor to build your queries and Grafana will visualize them in real time.

Zoom out time range
Time picker dropdown. Here you can access relative time range options, auto refresh options and set custom absolute time ranges.
Manual refresh button. Will cause all panels to refresh (fetch new data).
Row controls menu. Via this menu you can add panels to the row, set row height and more.
Dashboard panel. You edit panels by clicking the panel title.
Graph legend. You can change series colors, y-axis and series visibility directly from the legend.

Drag-and-Drop panels

You can Drag-and-Drop Panels within and between Rows. Click and hold the Panel title, and drag it to its new location. You can also easily resize panels by clicking the (-) and (+) icons.

Tips and shortcuts

Click the graph title and in the dropdown menu quickly change span or duplicate the panel.
Click the Save icon in the menu to save the dashboard with a new name
Click the Save icon in the menu and then advanced to export the dashboard to json file, or set it as your default dashboard.
Click the colored icon in the legend to select series color
Click series name in the legend to hide series
Ctrl/Shift/Meta + Click legend name to hide other series

Grafana loves the keyboard

Ctrl+S Saves the current dashboard
Ctrl+F Opens the dashboard finder / search
Ctrl+H Hides all controls (good for tv displays)
Hit Escape to exit graph when in fullscreen or edit mode

What's New in Grafana v2.0

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v2.0

Grafana 2.0 represents months of work by the Grafana team and the community. We are pleased to be able to release the Grafana 2.0 beta. This is a guide that describes some of changes and new features that can be found in Grafana V2.0.

If you are interested in how to migrate from Grafana V1.x to V2.0, please read our Migration Guide

New backend server

Grafana now ships with its own required backend server. Also completely open-source, it’s written in Go and has a full HTTP API.

In addition to new features, the backend server makes it much easier to set up and enjoy Grafana. Grafana 2.0 now ships as cross platform binaries with no dependencies. Authentication is built in, and Grafana is now capable of proxying connections to Data Sources. There are no longer any CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing) issues requiring messy workarounds. Elasticsearch is no longer required just to store dashboards.

User & Organization permissions

All Dashboards and Data Sources are linked to an Organization (not to a User). Users are linked to Organizations via a role. That role can be:

Viewer: Can only view dashboards, not save / create them.
Editor: Can view, update and create dashboards.
Admin: Everything an Editor can plus edit and add data sources and organization users.

Note A Viewer can still view all metrics exposed through a data source, not only the metrics used in already existing dashboards. That is because there are not per series permissions in Graphite, InfluxDB or OpenTSDB.

There are currently no permissions on individual dashboards.

Read more about Grafanas new user model on the Admin section

A Dashboard Snapshot is an easy way to create and share a URL for a stripped down, point-in-time version of any Dashboard. You can give this URL to anyone or everyone, and they can view the Snapshot even if they’re not a User of your Grafana instance.

You can set an expiration time for any Snapshots you create. When you create a Snapshot, we strip sensitive data, like panel metric queries, annotation and template queries and panel links. The data points displayed on screen for that specific time period in your Dashboard is saved in the JSON of the Snapshot itself.

Sharing a Snapshot is similar to sharing a link to a screenshot of your dashboard, only way better (they’ll look great at any screen resolution, you can hover over series, even zoom in). Also they are fast to load as they aren’t actually connected to any live Data Sources in any way.

They’re a great way to communicate about a particular incident with specific people who aren’t Users of your Grafana instance. You can also use them to show off your dashboards over the Internet.

Publish snapshots

You can publish snapshots locally or to snapshot.raintank.io. snapshot.raintank is a free service provided by raintank for hosting external Grafana snapshots.

Either way, anyone with the link (and access to your Grafana instance for local snapshots) can view it.

Panel time overrides & timeshift

In Grafana v2.x you can now override the relative time range for individual panels, causing them to be different than what is selected in the Dashboard time picker in the upper right. You can also add a time shift to individual panels. This allows you to show metrics from different time periods or days at the same time.

You control these overrides in panel editor mode and the new tab Time Range.

When you zoom or change the Dashboard time to a custom absolute time range, all panel overrides will be disabled. The panel relative time override is only active when the dashboard time is also relative. The panel timeshift override however is always active, even when the dashboard time is absolute.

The Hide time override info option allows you to hide the the override info text that is by default shown in the upper right of a panel when overridden time range options.

Currently you can only override the dashboard time with relative time ranges, not absolute time ranges.

Panel iframe embedding

You can embed a single panel on another web page or your own application using the panel share dialog.

Below you should see an iframe with a graph panel (taken from a Dashboard snapshot at snapshot.raintank.io.

Try hovering or zooming on the panel below!

This feature makes it easy to include interactive visualizations from your Grafana instance anywhere you want.

The top header has gotten a major streamlining in Grafana V2.0.

Side menubar toggle Toggle the side menubar on or off. This allows you to focus on the data presented on the Dashboard. The side menubar provides access to features unrelated to a Dashboard such as Users, Organizations, and Data Sources.
Dashboard dropdown The main dropdown shows you which Dashboard you are currently viewing, and allows you to easily switch to a new Dashboard. From here you can also create a new Dashboard, Import existing Dashboards, and manage the Playlist.
Star Dashboard: Star (or un-star) the current Dashboard. Starred Dashboards will show up on your own Home Dashboard by default, and are a convenient way to mark Dashboards that you’re interested in.
Share Dashboard: Share the current dashboard by creating a link or create a static Snapshot of it. Make sure the Dashboard is saved before sharing.
Save dashboard: Save the current Dashboard with the current name.
Settings: Manage Dashboard settings and features such as Templating, Annotations and the name.

Note In Grafana v2.0 when you change the title of a dashboard and then save it it will no longer create a new Dashboard. It will just change the name for the current Dashboard. To change name and create a new Dashboard use the Save As... menu option

New Side menubar

The new side menubar provides access to features such as User Preferences, Organizations, and Data Sources.

If you have multiple Organizations, you can easily switch between them here.

The side menubar will become more useful as we build out additional functionality in Grafana 2.x

You can easily collapse or re-open the side menubar at any time by clicking the Grafana icon in the top left. We never want to get in the way of the data.

New search view & starring dashboards

The dashboard search view has gotten a big overhaul. You can now see and filter by which dashboard you have personally starred.

Logarithmic scale

The Graph panel now supports 3 logarithmic scales, log base 10, log base 32, log base 1024. Logarithmic y-axis scales are very useful when rendering many series of different order of magnitude on the same scale (eg. latency, network traffic, and storage)

Dashlist panel

The dashlist is a new panel in Grafana v2.0. It allows you to show your personal starred dashboards, as well as do custom searches based on search strings or tags.

dashlist is used on the new Grafana Home screen. It is included as a reference Panel and is useful to provide basic linking between Dashboards.

Data Source proxy & admin views

Data sources in Grafana v2.0 are no longer defined in a config file. Instead, they are added through the UI or the HTTP API.

The backend can now proxy data from Data Sources, which means that it is a lot easier to get started using Grafana with Graphite or OpenTSDB without having to spend time with CORS (Cross origin resource sharing) work-arounds.

In addition, connections to Data Sources can be better controlled and secured, and authentication information no longer needs to be exposed to the browser.

Dashboard “now delay”

A commonly reported problem has been graphs dipping to zero at the the end, because metric data for the last interval has yet to be written to the Data Source. These graphs then “self correct” once the data comes in, but can look deceiving or alarming at times.

You can avoid this problem by adding a now delay in Dashboard Settings > Time Picker tab. This new feature will cause Grafana to ignore the most recent data up to the set delay.

The delay that may be necessary depends on how much latency you have in your collection pipeline.

Dashboard overwrite protection

Grafana v2.0 protects Users from accidentally overwriting each others Dashboard changes. Similar protections are in place if you try to create a new Dashboard with the same name as an existing one.

These protections are only the first step; we will be building out additional capabilities around dashboard versioning and management in future versions of Grafana.

User preferences

If you open side menu (by clicking on the Grafana icon in the top header) you can access your Profile Page.

Here you can update your user details, UI Theme, and change your password.

Server-side Panel rendering

Grafana now supports server-side PNG rendering. From the Panel share dialog you now have access to a link that will render a particular Panel to a PNG image.

Note This requires that your Data Source is accessible from your Grafana instance.

What's New in Grafana v2.1

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

What’s new in Grafana v2.1

Grafana 2.1 brings improvements in three core areas: dashboarding, authentication, and data sources. As with every Grafana release, there is a whole slew of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

More Dynamic Dashboards

The Templating system is one of the most powerful and well-used features of Grafana. The 2.1 release brings numerous improvements that make dashboards more dynamic than ever before.

Multi-Value Template Variables

A template variable with Multi-Value enabled allows for the selection of multiple values at the same time. These variables can then be used in any Panel to make them more dynamic, and to give you the perfect view of your data. Multi-Value variables is also enabling the new row repeat and panel repeat feature described below.

Repeating Rows and Panels

It’s now possible to create a dashboard that automatically adds (or removes) both rows and panels based on selected variable values. Any row or any panel can be configured to repeat (duplicate itself) based on a multi-value template variable.

To support better navigation between dashboards, it’s now possible to create custom and dynamic links from individual panels to appropriate Dashboards. You also have the ability to create flexible top-level links on any given dashboard thanks to the new dashboard navigation bar feature.

Dashboard links can be added under dashboard settings. Either defined as static URLs with a custom icon or as dynamic dashboard links or dropdowns based on custom dashboard search query. These links appear in the same row under the top menu where template variables appear.

Better local Dashboard support

Grafana can now index Dashboards saved locally as JSON from a given directory. These file based dashboards will appear in the regular dashboard search along regular DB dashboards.

Note: Saving local dashboards back the folder is not supported; this feature is meant for statically generated JSON dashboards.

New Authentication Options

New authentication methods add numerous options to manage users, roles and organizations.

LDAP support

This highly requested feature now allows your Grafana users to login with their LDAP credentials. You can also specify mappings between LDAP group memberships and Grafana Organization user roles.

Basic Auth Support

You can now authenticate against the Grafana API utilizing a simple username and password with basic HTTP authentication.

Note: This can be useful for provisioning and config management systems that need to utilize the API without having to create an API key.

Auth Proxy Support

You can now authenticate utilizing a header (eg. X-Authenticated-User, or X-WEBAUTH-USER)

Note: this can be useful in situations with reverse proxies.

New “Read-only Editor” User Role

There is a new User role available in this version of Grafana: “Read-only Editor”. This role behaves just like the Viewer role does in Grafana 2.0. That is you can edit graphs and queries but not save dashboards. The Viewer role has been modified in Grafana 2.1 so that users assigned this role can no longer edit panels.

Data source Improvements

InfluxDB 0.9 Support

Grafana 2.1 now comes with full support for InfluxDB 0.9. There is a new query editor designed from scratch for the new features InfluxDB 0.9 enables.

OpenTSDB Improvements

Grafana OpenTSDB data source now supports template variable values queries. This means you can create template variables that fetches the values from OpenTSDB (for example metric names, tag names, or tag values). The query editor is also enhanced to limiting tags by metric.

Note: OpenTSDB config option tsd.core.meta.enable_realtime_ts must enabled for OpenTSDB lookup api)

New Data Source: KairosDB

The Cassandra backed time series database KairosDB is now supported in Grafana out of the box. Thank you to masaori335 for his hard work in getting it to this point.

Panel Improvements

Grafana 2.1 gives you even more flexibility customizing how individual panels render. Overriding the colors of specific series using regular expressions, changing how series stack, and allowing string values will help you better understand your data at a glance.

Graph Panel

Define series color using regex rule. This is useful when you have templated graphs with series names that change depending selected template variables. Using a regex style override rule you could for example make all series that contain the word CPU red and assigned to the second y axis.

New series style override, negative-y transform and stack groups. Negative y transform is very useful if you want to plot a series on the negative y scale without affecting the legend values like min or max or the values shown in the hover tooltip.

Singlestat Panel

Now support string values. Useful for time series database like InfluxDB that supports string values.

Changelog

For a detailed list and link to github issues for everything included in the 2.1 release please view the CHANGELOG.md file.

What's New in Grafana v2.5

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

What’s new in Grafana v2.5

Release highlights

This is an exciting release, and we want to share some of the highlights. The release includes many fixes and enhancements to all areas of Grafana, like new Data Sources, a new and improved timepicker, user invites, panel resize handles and improved InfluxDB and OpenTSDB support.

New time range controls

A new timepicker with room for more quick ranges as well as new types of relative ranges, like Today, The day so far and This day last week. Also an improved time & calendar picker that now works correctly in UTC mode.

Elasticsearch

This release brings a fully featured query editor for Elasticsearch. You will now be able to visualize logs or any kind of data stored in Elasticserarch. The query editor allows you to build both simple and complex queries for logs or metrics.

Compute metrics from your documents, supported Elasticsearch aggregations:
- Count, Avg, Min, Max, Sum
- Percentiles, Std Dev, etc.
Group by multiple terms or filters
- Specify group by options like Top 5 based on Avg @value
Auto completion for field names
Query only relevant indices based on time pattern
Alias patterns for short readable series names

Try the new Elasticsearch query editor on the play.grafana.org site.

CloudWatch

Grafana 2.5 ships with a new CloudWatch datasource that will allow you to query and visualize CloudWatch metrics directly from Grafana.

Rich editor with auto completion for metric names, namespaces and dimensions
Templating queries for generic dashboards
Alias patterns for short readable series names

Prometheus

Grafana 2.5 ships with a new Prometheus datasource that will allow you to query and visualize data stored in Prometheus.

Mix different data sources

In previous releases you have been able to mix different data sources on the same dashboard. In v2.5 you will be able to mix then on the same graph! You can enable this by selecting the built in -- Mixed -- data source. When selected this will allow you to specify data source on a per query basis. This will, for example, allow you to plot metrics from different Graphite servers on the same Graph or plot data from Elasticsearch alongside data from Prometheus. Mixing different data sources on the same graph works for any data source, even custom ones.

Panel Resize handles

This release adds resize handles to the the bottom right corners of panels making is easy to resize both width and height.

User invites

This version also brings some new features for user management.

Organization admins can now invite new users (via email or manually via invite link)
Users can signup using invite link and get automatically added to invited organization
User signup workflow can (if enabled) contain an email verification step.
Check out #2353 for more info.

Miscellaneous improvements

InfluxDB query editor now supports math and AS expressions
InfluxDB query editor now supports custom group by interval
Panel drilldown link is easier to reach
LDAP improvements (can now search for group membership if your LDAP server does not support memberOf attribute)
More units for graph and singlestat panel (Length, Volume, Temperature, Pressure, Currency)
Admin page for all organizations (remove / edit)

Breaking changes

There have been some changes to the data source plugin API. If you are using a custom plugin check that there is an update for it before you upgrade. Also the new time picker does not currently support custom quick ranges like the last one did. This will likely be added in a future release.

Changelog

For a detailed list and link to github issues for everything included in the 2.5 release please view the CHANGELOG.md file.

Download Grafana 2.5 now

What's New in Grafana v2.6

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

What’s new in Grafana v2.6

Release highlights

The release includes a new Table panel, a new InfluxDB query editor, support for Elasticsearch Pipeline Metrics and support for multiple Cloudwatch credentials.

Table Panel

The new table panel is very flexible, supporting both multiple modes for time series as well as for table, annotation and raw JSON data. It also provides date formating and value formating and coloring options.

Time series to rows

In the most simple mode you can turn time series to rows. This means you get a Time, Metric and a Value column. Where Metric is the name of the time series.

Table Transform

Above you see the options tab for the Table Panel. The most important option is the To Table Transform. This option controls how the result of the metric/data query is turned into a table.

Column Styles

The column styles allow you control how dates and numbers are formatted.

Time series to columns

This transform allows you to take multiple time series and group them by time. Which will result in a Time column and a column for each time series.

In the screenshot above you can see how the same time series query as in the previous example can be transformed into a different table by changing the To Table Transform to Time series to columns.

Time series to aggregations

This transform works very similar to the legend values in the Graph panel. Each series gets its own row. In the Options tab you can select which aggregations you want using the plus button the Columns section.

You have to think about how accurate the aggregations will be. It depends on what aggregation is used in the time series query, how many data points are fetched, etc. The time series aggregations are calculated by Grafana after aggregation is performed by the time series database.

Raw logs queries

If you want to show documents from Elasticsearch pick Raw Document as the first metric.

This in combination with the JSON Data table transform will allow you to pick which fields in the document you want to show in the table.

Elasticsearch aggregations

You can also make Elasticsearch aggregation queries without a Date Histogram. This allows you to use Elasticsearch metric aggregations to get accurate aggregations for the selected time range.

Annotations

The table can also show any annotations you have enabled in the dashboard.

The New InfluxDB Editor

The new InfluxDB editor is a lot more flexible and powerful. It supports nested functions, like derivative. It also uses the same technique as the Graphite query editor in that it presents nested functions as chain of function transformations. It tries to simplify and unify the complicated nature of InfluxDB’s query language.

In the SELECT row you can specify what fields and functions you want to use. If you have a group by time you need an aggregation function. Some functions like derivative require an aggregation function.

The editor tries simplify and unify this part of the query. For example:

The above will generate the following InfluxDB SELECT clause:

SELECT derivative(mean("value"), 10s) /10 AS "REQ/s" FROM ....

Select multiple fields

Use the plus button and select Field > field to add another SELECT clause. You can also specify an asterix * to select all fields.

Group By

To group by a tag click the plus icon at the end of the GROUP BY row. Pick a tag from the dropdown that appears. You can remove the group by by clicking on the tag and then click on the x icon.

The new editor also allows you to remove group by time and select raw table data. Which is very useful in combination with the new Table panel to show raw log data stored in InfluxDB.

Pipeline metrics

If you have Elasticsearch 2.x and Grafana 2.6 or above then you can use pipeline metric aggregations like Moving Average and Derivative. Elasticsearch pipeline metrics require another metric to be based on. Use the eye icon next to the metric to hide metrics from appearing in the graph.

Changelog

For a detailed list and link to github issues for everything included in the 2.6 release please view the CHANGELOG.md file.

Download Grafana 2.6 now

What's New in Grafana v3.0

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v3.0

Commercial Support

Commercial Support subscriptions for Grafana are now generally available.

Raintank is committed to a 100% open-source strategy for Grafana. We do not want to go down the “open core” route. If your organization finds Grafana valuable, please consider purchasing a subscription. Get direct support, bug fixes, and training from the core Grafana team.

Plugins

With the popularity of Grafana continuing to accelerate, it has been challenging to keep up with all the requests for new features, new panels, new data sources, and new functionality. Saying “no” so often has been frustrating, especially for an open source project with such a vibrant community.

The team felt that it was time to dramatically improve extensibility through plugin support. Grafana 3.0 comes with a completely revamped plugin SDK / API.

We’ve refactored our Data Source plugin architecture and added two new plugin types:

Panel plugins let you add new panel types for your Dashboards.
App plugins bundle Panels plugins, Data Sources plugins, Dashboards, and Grafana Pages. Apps are a great way to provide an entire experience right within Grafana.

Grafana.com

Grafana.com offers a central repository where the community can come together to discover, create and share plugins (data sources, panels, apps) and dashboards.

We are also working on a hosted Graphite-compatible data source that will be optimized for use with Grafana. It’ll be easy to combine your existing data source(s) with this OpenSaaS option. Finally, Grafana.com can also be a hub to manage all your Grafana instances. You’ll be able to monitor their health and availability, perform dashboard backups, and more.

We are also working on a hosted Graphite-compatible Data Source that will be optimized for use with Grafana. It’ll be easy to combine your existing Data Source(s) with this OpenSaaS option.

Finally, Grafana.com will also be a hub to manage all your Grafana instances. You’ll be able to monitor their health and availability, perform Dashboard backups, and more.

Grafana.net will officially launch along with the stable version of Grafana 3.0, but go to and check out the preview and sign up for an account in the meantime.

grafana-cli

Grafana 3.0 comes with a new command line tool called grafana-cli. You can easily install plugins from Grafana.net with it. For example:

grafana-cli install grafana-pie-chart-panel

Personalization & Preferences

The home dashboard, timezone and theme can now be customized on Organization and user Profile level. Grafana can also track recently viewed dashboards, which can then be displayed in the dashboard list panel.

Improved Playlists

You can now save Playlists, and start them by using a Playlist URL. If you update a running Playlist, it will update after its next cycle.

This is powerful as it allows you to remote control Grafana. If you have a big TV display showing Grafana in your company lobby, create a playlist named Lobby, and start it on the computer connected to the Lobby TV.

You can now change the Lobby playlist and have the dashboards shown in the Lobby update accordingly, automatically.

The playlist does not even have to contain multiple Dashboards; you can use this feature to reload the whole Dashboard (and Grafana) periodically and remotely.

You can also make Playlists dynamic by using Dashboard tags to define the Playlist.

Improved UI

We’ve always tried to focus on a good looking, usable, and responsive UI. We’ve continued to pay a lot of attention to these areas in this release.

Grafana 3.0 has a dramatically updated UI that not only looks better but also has a number of usability improvements. The side menu now works as a dropdown that you can pin to the side. The Organization / Profile / Sign out side menu links have been combined into an on hover slide out menu.

In addition, all the forms and the layouts of all pages have been updated to look and flow better, and be much more consistent. There are literally hundreds of UI improvements and refinements.

Here’s the new side menu in action:

And here’s the new look for Dashboard settings:

Check out the Play Site to get a feel for some of the UI changes.

Improved Annotations

It is now possible to define a link in each annotation. You can hover over the link and click the annotation text. This feature is very useful for linking to particular commits or tickets where more detailed information can be presented to the user.

Data source variables

This has been a top requested feature for very long we are exited to finally provide this feature. You can now add a new Data source type variable. That will automatically be filled with instance names of your data sources.

You can then use this variable as the panel data source:

This will allow you to quickly change data source server and reuse the same dashboard for different instances of your metrics backend. For example you might have Graphite running in multiple data centers or environments.

Prometheus, InfluxDB, and OpenTSDB improvements

All three of these popular included Data Sources have seen a variety of improvements in this release. Here are some highlights:

Prometheus

The Prometheus Data Source now supports annotations.

InfluxDB

You can now select the InfluxDB policy from the query editor.

Grafana 3.0 also comes with support for InfluxDB 0.11 and InfluxDB 0.12.

OpenTSDB

OpenTSDB 2.2 is better supported and now supports millisecond precision.

Breaking changes

Dashboards from v2.6 are compatible; no manual updates should be necessary. There could be some edge case scenarios where dashboards using templating could stop working. If that is the case just enter the edit view for the template variable and hit Update button. This is due to a simplification of the variable format system where template variables are now stored without any formatting (glob/regex/etc), this is done on the fly when the variable is interpolated.

Plugin API: The plugin API has changed so if you are using a custom data source (or panel) they need to be updated as well.
InfluxDB 0.8: This data source is no longer included in releases, you can still install manually from Grafana.com
KairosDB: This data source has also no longer shipped with Grafana, you can install it manually from Grafana.com

Plugin showcase

Discovering and installing plugins is very quick and easy with Grafana 3.0 and Grafana.com. Here are a couple that I incurage you try!

Clock Panel

Support’s both current time and count down mode.

Pie Chart Panel

A simple pie chart panel is now available as an external plugin.

WorldPing App

This is full blown Grafana App that adds new panels, data sources and pages to give feature rich global performance monitoring directly from your on-prem Grafana.

Zabbix App

This app contains the already very pouplar Zabbix data source plugin, 2 dashboards and a triggers panel. It is created and maintained by Alexander Zobnin.

Checkout the full list of plugins on Grafana.com

CHANGELOG

For a detailed list and link to github issues for everything included in the 3.0 release please view the CHANGELOG.md file.

What's New in Grafana v3.1

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v3.1

Dashboard Export & Import

The export feature is now accessed from the share menu.

Dashboards exported from Grafana 3.1 are now more portable and easier for others to import than before. The export process extracts information data source types used by panels and adds these to a new inputs section in the dashboard json. So when you or another person tries to import the dashboard they will be asked to select data source and optional metrix prefix options.

The above screenshot shows the new import modal that gives you 3 options for how to import a dashboard. One notable new addition here is the ability to import directly from Dashboards shared on Grafana.com.

The next step in the import process:

Here you can change the name of the dashboard and also pick what data sources you want the dashboard to use. The above screenshot shows a CollectD dashboard for Graphite that requires a metric prefix be specified.

Discover Dashboards

On Grafana.com you can now browse & search for dashboards. We have already added a few but more are being uploaded every day. To import a dashboard just copy the dashboard url and head back to Grafana, then Dashboard Search -> Import -> Paste Grafana.com Dashboard URL.

Constant template variables

We added a new template variable named constant that makes it easier to share and export dashboard that have custom prefixes.

Dashboard Urls

Having current time range and template variable value always sync with the URL makes it possible to always copy your current Grafana url to share with a colleague without having to use the Share modal.

Internal metrics

Do you want metrics about viewing metrics? Ofc you do! In this release we added support for sending metrics about Grafana to graphite. You can configure interval and server in the config file.

Logging

Switched logging framework to log15 to enable key value per logging and filtering based on different log levels. Its now possible to configure different log levels for different modules.

Breaking changes

Logging format have been changed to improve log filtering.
Graphite PNG Graphite PNG support dropped from Graph panel (use Grafana native PNG instead).
Migration No longer possible to migrate dashboards from 1.x (Stored in ES or Influx 0.8).

CHANGELOG

For a detailed list and link to github issues for everything included in the 3.1 release please view the CHANGELOG.md file.

What's New in Grafana v4.0

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v4.0

As usual this release contains a ton of minor new features, fixes and improved UX. But on top of the usual new goodies is a core new feature: Alerting! Read on below for a detailed description of what’s new in v4.0.

Alerting

Alerting is a really revolutionary feature for Grafana. It transforms Grafana from a visualization tool into a truly mission critical monitoring tool. The alert rules are very easy to configure using your existing graph panels and threshold levels can be set simply by dragging handles to the right side of the graph. The rules will continually be evaluated by grafana-server and notifications will be sent out when the rule conditions are met.

This feature has been worked on for over a year with many iterations and rewrites just to make sure the foundations are really solid. We are really proud to finally release it! Since the alerting execution is processed in the backend not all data source plugins are supported. Right now Graphite, Prometheus, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB are supported. Elasticsearch is being worked on but will be not ready for v4 release.

Rules

The rule config allows you to specify a name, how often the rule should be evaluated and a series of conditions that all need to be true for the alert to fire.

Currently the only condition type that exists is a Query condition that allows you to specify a query letter, time range and an aggregation function. The letter refers to a query you already have added in the Metrics tab. The result from the query and the aggregation function is a single value that is then used in the threshold check.

We plan to add other condition types in the future, like Other Alert, where you can include the state of another alert in your conditions, and Time Of Day.

Notifications

Alerting would not be very useful if there was no way to send notifications when rules trigger and change state. You can setup notifications of different types. We currently have Slack, PagerDuty, Email and Webhook with more in the pipe that will be added during beta period. The notifications can then be added to your alert rules. If you have configured an external image store in the grafana.ini config file (s3 and webdav options available) you can get very rich notifications with an image of the graph and the metric values all included in the notification.

Annotations

Alert state changes are recorded in a new annotation store that is built into Grafana. This store currently only supports storing annotations in Grafana’s own internal database (mysql, postgres or sqlite). The Grafana annotation storage is currently only used for alert state changes but we hope to add the ability for users to add graph comments in the form of annotations directly from within Grafana in a future release.

Alert List Panel

This new panel allows you to show alert rules or a history of alert rule state changes. You can filter based on states you are interested in. This panel is very useful for overview style dashboards.

Ad-hoc filter variable

This is a new and very different type of template variable. It will allow you to create new key/value filters on the fly with autocomplete for both key and values. The filter condition will be automatically applied to all queries that use that data source. This feature opens up more exploratory dashboards. In the gif animation to the right you have a dashboard for Elasticsearch log data. It uses one query variable that allow you to quickly change how the data is grouped, and an interval variable for controlling the granularity of the time buckets. What was missing was a way to dynamically apply filters to the log query. With the Ad-Hoc Filters variable you can dynamically add filters to any log property!

UX Improvements

We always try to bring some UX/UI refinements & polish in every release.

TV-mode & Kiosk mode

Grafana is so often used on wall mounted TVs that we figured a clean TV mode would be really nice. In TV mode the top navbar, row & panel controls will all fade to transparent.

<p>
  This happens automatically after one minute of user inactivity but can also be toggled manually
  with the <code>d v</code> sequence shortcut. Any mouse movement or keyboard action will
  restore navbar & controls.
</p>

<p>
  Another feature is the kiosk mode. This can be enabled with <code>d k</code>
  shortcut or by adding <code>&kiosk</code> to the URL when you load a dashboard.
  In kiosk mode the navbar is completely hidden/removed from view.
</p>

Your browser does not support the video tag.

We spent a lot of time improving the dashboard building experience to make it both more efficient and easier for beginners. After many good but not great experiments with a build mode we eventually decided to just improve the green row menu and continue work on a build mode for a future release.

The new row menu automatically slides out when you mouse over the edge of the row. You no longer need to hover over the small green icon and then click it to expand the row menu.

There are some minor improvements to drag and drop behaviour. Now when dragging a panel from one row to another you will insert the panel and Grafana will automatically make room for it. When you drag a panel within a row you will simply reorder the panels.

If you look at the animation to the right you can see that you can drag and drop a new panel. This is not required, you can also just click the panel type and it will be inserted at the end of the row automatically. Dragging a new panel has an advantage in that you can insert a new panel where ever you want not just at the end of the row.

We plan to further improve dashboard building in the future with a more rich grid & layout system.

Keyboard shortcuts

Grafana v4 introduces a number of really powerful keyboard shortcuts. You can now focus a panel by hovering over it with your mouse. With a panel focused you can simply hit e to toggle panel edit mode, or v to toggle fullscreen mode. p r removes the panel. p s opens share modal.

Some nice navigation shortcuts are:

g h for go to home dashboard
s s open search with starred pre-selected
s t open search in tags list view

Upgrade & Breaking changes

There are no breaking changes. Old dashboards and features should work the same. Grafana-server will automatically upgrade its db schema on restart. It’s advisable to do a backup of Grafana’s database before updating.

If you are using plugins make sure to update your plugins as some might not work perfectly v4.

You can update plugins using grafana-cli

grafana-cli plugins update-all

Changelog

Checkout the CHANGELOG.md file for a complete list of new features, changes, and bug fixes.

What's New in Grafana v4.1

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

Whats new in Grafana v4.1

Graph: Support for shared tooltip on all graphs as you hover over one graph. #1578, #6274
Victorops: Add VictorOps notification integration #6411, thx @ichekrygin
Opsgenie: Add OpsGenie notification integratiion #6687, thx @kylemcc
Cloudwatch: Make it possible to specify access and secret key on the data source config page #6697
Elasticsearch: Added support for Elasticsearch 5.x #5740, thx @lpic10
Panel: Added help text for panels. #4079, thx @utkarshcmu
Full changelog

Shared tooltip

Showing the tooltip on all panels at the same time has been a long standing request in Grafana and we are really happy to finally be able to release it. You can enable/disable the shared tooltip from the dashboard settings menu or cycle between default, shared tooltip and shared crosshair by pressing CTRL + O or CMD + O.

Help text for panel

You can set a help text in the general tab on any panel. The help text is using Markdown to enable better formating and linking to other sites that can provide more information.

Panels with a help text available have a little indicator in the top left corner. You can show the help text by hovering the icon.

Easier Cloudwatch configuration

In Grafana 4.1.0 you can configure your Cloudwatch data source with access key and secret key directly in the data source configuration page. This enables people to use the Cloudwatch data source without having access to the filesystem where Grafana is running.

Once the access key and secret key have been saved the user will no longer be able to view them.

Upgrade & Breaking changes

Elasticsearch 1.x is no longer supported. Please upgrade to Elasticsearch 2.x or 5.x. Otherwise Grafana 4.1.0 contains no breaking changes.

Changelog

Checkout the CHANGELOG.md file for a complete list of new features, changes, and bug fixes.

Download

Head to v4.1 download page for download links & instructions.

Thanks

A big thanks to all the Grafana users who contribute by submitting PRs, bug reports & feedback!

What's New in Grafana v4.2

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

Whats new in Grafana v4.2

Grafana v4.2 Beta is now available for download. Just like the last release this one contains lots bug fixes and minor improvements. We are very happy to say that 27 of 40 issues was closed by pull requests from the community. Big thumbs up!

Release Highlights

Hipchat: Adds support for sending alert notifications to hipchat #6451, thx @jregovic
Telegram: Added Telegram alert notifier #7098, thx @leonoff
LINE: Add LINE as alerting notification channel #7301, thx @huydx
Templating: Make $__interval and $__interval_ms global built in variables that can be used in by any datasource (in panel queries), closes #7190, closes #6582
Alerting: Adds deduping of alert notifications #7632
Alerting: Better information about why an alert triggered #7035
Orgs: Sharing dashboards using Grafana share feature will now redirect to correct org. #6948
Full changelog

New alert notification channels

This release adds five new alert notifications channels, all of them contributed by the community.

Hipchat
Telegram
LINE
Pushover
Threema

Templating

We added two new global built in variables in grafana. $__interval and $__interval_ms are now reserved template names in grafana and can be used by any datasource. We might add more global built in variables in the future and if we do we will prefix them with $__. So please avoid using that in your template variables.

Dedupe alert notifications when running multiple servers

In this release we will dedupe alert notificiations when you are running multiple servers. This makes it possible to run alerting on multiple servers and only get one notification.

We currently solve this with sql transactions which puts some limitations for how many servers you can use to execute the same rules. 3-5 servers should not be a problem but as always, it depends on how many alerts you have and how frequently they execute.

Next up for a better HA situation is to add support for workload balancing between Grafana servers.

Alerting more info

You can now see the reason why an alert triggered in the alert history. Its also easier to detect when an alert is set to alerting due to the no_data option.

Improved support for multi-org setup

When loading dashboards we now set an query parameter called orgId. So we can detect from which org an user shared a dashboard. This makes it possible for users to share dashboards between orgs without changing org first.

We aim to introduce dashboard groups sometime in the future which will introduce access control and user groups within one org. Making it possible to have users in multiple groups and have detailed access control.

Upgrade & Breaking changes

If your using https in grafana we now force you to use tls 1.2 and the most secure ciphers. We think its better to be secure by default rather then making it configurable. If you want to run https with lower versions of tls we suggest you put a reserve proxy in front of grafana.

If you have template variables name $__interval or $__interval_ms they will no longer work since these keywords are reserved as global built in variables. We might add more global built in variables in the future and if we do, we will prefix them with $__. So please avoid using that in your template variables.

Changelog

Checkout the CHANGELOG.md file for a complete list of new features, changes, and bug fixes.

Download

Head to v4.2-beta download page for download links & instructions.

Thanks

A big thanks to all the Grafana users who contribute by submitting PRs, bug reports & feedback!

What's New in Grafana v4.3

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:27:57 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v4.3

Grafana v4.3 Beta is now available for download.

Release Highlights

New Heatmap Panel
Graph Panel Histogram Mode
Elasticsearch Histogram Aggregation
Prometheus Table data format
New MySQL Data Source (alpha version to get some early feedback)
60+ small fixes and improvements, most of them contributed by our fantastic community!

Check out the New Features in v4.3 Dashboard on the Grafana Play site for a showcase of these new features.

Histogram Support

A Histogram is a kind of bar chart that groups numbers into ranges, often called buckets or bins. Taller bars show that more data falls in that range.

The Graph Panel now supports Histograms.

Histogram Aggregation Support for Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is the only supported data source that can return pre-bucketed data (data that is already grouped into ranges). With other data sources there is a risk of returning inaccurate data in a histogram due to using already aggregated data rather than raw data. This release adds support for Elasticsearch pre-bucketed data that can be visualized with the new Heatmap Panel.

Heatmap Panel

The Histogram support in the Graph Panel does not show changes over time - it aggregates all the data together for the chosen time range. To visualize a histogram over time, we have built a new Heatmap Panel.

Every column in a Heatmap is a histogram snapshot. Instead of visualizing higher values with higher bars, a heatmap visualizes higher values with color. The histogram shown above is equivalent to one column in the heatmap shown below.

The Heatmap panel also works with Elasticsearch Histogram Aggregations for more accurate server side bucketing.

MySQL Data Source (alpha)

This release includes a new core data source for MySQL. You can write any possible MySQL query and format it as either Time Series or Table Data allowing it be used with the Graph Panel, Table Panel and SingleStat Panel.

We are still working on the MySQL data source. As it’s missing some important features, like templating and macros and future changes could be breaking, we are labeling the state of the data source as Alpha. Instead of holding up the release of v4.3 we are including it in its current shape to get some early feedback. So please try it out and let us know what you think on twitter or on our community forum. Is this a feature that you would use? How can we make it better?

The query editor can show the generated and interpolated SQL that is sent to the MySQL server.

The query editor will also show any errors that resulted from running the query (very useful when you have a syntax error!).

Health Check Endpoint

Now you can monitor the monitoring with the Health Check Endpoint! The new /api/health endpoint returns HTTP 200 OK if everything is up and HTTP 503 Error if the Grafana database cannot be pinged.

Lazy Load Panels

Grafana now delays loading panels until they become visible (scrolled into view). This means panels out of view are not sending requests thereby reducing the load on your time series database.

Prometheus - Table Data (column per label)

The Prometheus data source now supports the Table Data format by automatically assigning a column to a label. This makes it really easy to browse data in the table panel.

Other Highlights From The Changelog

Changes:

Table: Support to change column header text #3551
InfluxDB: influxdb query builder support for ORDER BY and LIMIT (allows TOPN queries) #6065 Support influxdb’s SLIMIT Feature #7232 thx @thuck
Graph: Support auto grid min/max when using log scale #3090, thx @bigbenhur
Prometheus: Make Prometheus query field a textarea #7663, thx @hagen1778
Server: Support listening on a UNIX socket #4030, thx @mitjaziv

Fixes:

MySQL: 4-byte UTF8 not supported when using MySQL database (allows Emojis in Dashboard Names) #7958
Dashboard: Description tooltip is not fully displayed #7970

Lots more enhancements and fixes can be found in the Changelog.

Download

Head to the v4.3 download page for download links & instructions.

Thanks

A big thanks to all the Grafana users who contribute by submitting PRs, bug reports, helping out on our community site and providing feedback!

Guides on Grafana Labs

Basic Concepts

Basic Concepts

Data Source

Organization

User

Row

Panel

Query Editor

Dashboard

Getting Started

Getting started

Beginner guides

Basic Concepts

Top header

Dashboards, Panels, Rows, the building blocks of Grafana…

Adding & Editing Graphs and Panels

Drag-and-Drop panels

Tips and shortcuts

Grafana loves the keyboard

What's New in Grafana v2.0

What’s New in Grafana v2.0

New backend server

User & Organization permissions

Dashboard Snapshot sharing

Publish snapshots

Panel time overrides & timeshift

Panel iframe embedding

New dashboard top header

New Side menubar

New search view & starring dashboards

Logarithmic scale

Dashlist panel

Data Source proxy & admin views

Dashboard “now delay”

Dashboard overwrite protection

User preferences

Server-side Panel rendering

What's New in Grafana v2.1

What’s new in Grafana v2.1

More Dynamic Dashboards

Multi-Value Template Variables

Repeating Rows and Panels

Dashboard Links & Navigation

Better local Dashboard support

New Authentication Options

LDAP support

Basic Auth Support

Auth Proxy Support

New “Read-only Editor” User Role

Data source Improvements

InfluxDB 0.9 Support

OpenTSDB Improvements

New Data Source: KairosDB

Panel Improvements

Graph Panel

Singlestat Panel

Changelog

What's New in Grafana v2.5

What’s new in Grafana v2.5

Release highlights

New time range controls

Elasticsearch

CloudWatch

Prometheus

Mix different data sources

Panel Resize handles

User invites

Miscellaneous improvements

Breaking changes

Changelog

Download Grafana 2.5 now

What's New in Grafana v2.6

What’s new in Grafana v2.6

Release highlights

Table Panel

Time series to rows

Table Transform

Column Styles

Time series to columns