Guides on Grafana Labs

Basic Concepts

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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 Rows 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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. If not please read the installation guide.

Logging in for the first time

To run Grafana open your browser and go to http://localhost:3000/. 3000 is the default http port that Grafana listens to if you haven’t configured a different port.

There you will see the login page. Default username is admin and default password is admin. When you log in for the first time you will be asked to change your password. We strongly encourage you to follow Grafana’s best practices and change the default administrator password. You can later go to user preferences and change your user name.

How to add a data source

Before you create your first dashboard you need to add your data source.

First move your cursor to the cog on the side menu which will show you the configuration menu. If the side menu is not visible click the Grafana icon in the upper left corner. The first item on the configuration menu is data sources, click on that and you’ll be taken to the data sources page where you can add and edit data sources. You can also simply click the cog.

Click Add data source and you will come to the settings page of your new data source.

First, give the data source a Name and then select which Type of data source you’ll want to create, see Supported data sources for more information and how to configure your data source.

After you have configuered your data source you are ready to save and test.

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 on the right side 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 or folder, Import existing Dashboards, and manage Dashboard playlists.
Add Panel: Adds a new panel to the current Dashboard
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, 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 grid. 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 Graphite, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and AWS Cloudwatch). The Basic Concepts guide explores these key ideas in detail.

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).
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.

Adding & Editing Graphs and Panels

You add panels by clicking the Add panel icon on the top menu.
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.

Drag-and-Drop panels

You can Drag-and-Drop Panels by simply clicking and holding 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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 Grafana’s 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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 Elasticsearch. 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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 formatting and value formatting 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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 encourage 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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 metric 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? Of course 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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, webdav, and azure_blob 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 behavior. 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s 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 formatting 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s 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 notifications 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 you’re 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

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +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!

What's New in Grafana v4.4

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v4.4

Grafana v4.4 is now available for download.

Highlights:

Dashboard History - version control for dashboards.

New Features

Dashboard History: View dashboard version history, compare any two versions (summary & json diffs), restore to old version. This big feature was contributed by Walmart Labs. Big thanks to them for this massive contribution! Initial feature request: #4638 Pull Request: #8472

Enhancements

Elasticsearch: Added filter aggregation label #8420, thx @tianzk
Sensu: Added option for source and handler #8405, thx @joemiller
CSV: Configurable csv export datetime format #8058, thx @cederigo
Table Panel: Column style that preserves formatting/indentation (like pre tag) #6617
DingDing: Add DingDing Alert Notifier #8473 thx @jiamliang

Minor Enhancements

Elasticsearch: Add option for result set size in raw_document #3426 #8527, thx @mk-dhia

Bug Fixes

Graph: Bug fix for negative values in histogram mode #8628

Download

Head to the v4.4 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!

What's New in Grafana v4.5

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v4.5

Highlights

New prometheus query editor

The new query editor has full syntax highlighting. As well as auto complete for metrics, functions, and range vectors. There is also integrated function docs right from the query editor!

Elasticsearch: Add ad-hoc filters from the table panel

Table cell links!

Create column styles that turn cells into links that use the value in the cell (or other other row values) to generate a url to another dashboard or system:

Query Inspector

Query Inspector is a new feature that shows query requests and responses. This can be helpful if a graph is not shown or shows something very different than what you expected. More information here.

Changelog

New Features

Table panel: Render cell values as links that can have an url template that uses variables from current table row. #3754
Elasticsearch: Add ad hoc filters directly by clicking values in table panel #8052.
MySQL: New rich query editor with syntax highlighting
Prometheus: New rich query editor with syntax highlighting, metric & range auto complete and integrated function docs. #5117

Enhancements

GitHub OAuth: Support for GitHub organizations with 100+ teams. #8846, thx @skwashd
Graphite: Calls to Graphite api /metrics/find now include panel or dashboard time range (from & until) in most cases, #8055
Graphite: Added new graphite 1.0 functions, available if you set version to 1.0.x in data source settings. New Functions: mapSeries, reduceSeries, isNonNull, groupByNodes, offsetToZero, grep, weightedAverage, removeEmptySeries, aggregateLine, averageOutsidePercentile, delay, exponentialMovingAverage, fallbackSeries, integralByInterval, interpolate, invert, linearRegression, movingMin, movingMax, movingSum, multiplySeriesWithWildcards, pow, powSeries, removeBetweenPercentile, squareRoot, timeSlice, closes #8261

Elasticsearch: Ad-hoc filters now use query phrase match filters instead of term filters, works on non keyword/raw fields #9095.

Breaking change

InfluxDB/Elasticsearch: The panel & data source option named “Group by time interval” is now named “Min time interval” and does now always define a lower limit for the auto group by time. Without having to use > prefix (that prefix still works). This should in theory have close to zero actual impact on existing dashboards. It does mean that if you used this setting to define a hard group by time interval of, say “1d”, if you zoomed to a time range wide enough the time range could increase above the “1d” range as the setting is now always considered a lower limit.

This option is now renamed (and moved to Options sub section above your queries):

Datas source selection & options & help are now above your metric queries.

Minor Changes

InfluxDB: Change time range filter for absolute time ranges to be inclusive instead of exclusive #8319, thx @Oxydros
InfluxDB: Added parenthesis around tag filters in queries #9131

Bug Fixes

Modals: Maintain scroll position after opening/leaving modal #8800
Templating: You cannot select data source variables as data source for other template variables #7510

What's New in Grafana v4.6

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v4.6

Grafana v4.6 brings many enhancements to Annotations, Cloudwatch & Prometheus. It also adds support for Postgres as metric & table data source!

Annotations

You can now add annotation events and regions right from the graph panel! Just hold CTRL/CMD + click or drag region to open the Add Annotation view. The Annotations documentation is updated to include details on this new exciting feature.

Cloudwatch

Cloudwatch now supports alerting. Setup alert rules for any Cloudwatch metric!

Postgres

Grafana v4.6 now ships with a built-in datasource plugin for Postgres. Have logs or metric data in Postgres? You can now visualize that data and define alert rules on it like any of our other data sources.

Prometheus

New enhancements include support for instant queries and improvements to query editor in the form of autocomplete for label names and label values. This makes exploring and filtering Prometheus data much easier.

Changelog

New Features

GCS: Adds support for Google Cloud Storage #8370 thx @chuhlomin
Prometheus: Adds /metrics endpoint for exposing Grafana metrics. #9187
Graph: Add support for local formatting in axis. #1395, thx @m0nhawk
Jaeger: Add support for open tracing using jaeger in Grafana. #9213
Unit types: New date & time unit types added, useful in singlestat to show dates & times. #3678, #6710, #2764
CLI: Make it possible to install plugins from any url #5873
Prometheus: Add support for instant queries #5765, thx @mtanda
Cloudwatch: Add support for alerting using the cloudwatch datasource #8050, thx @mtanda
Pagerduty: Include triggering series in pagerduty notification #8479, thx @rickymoorhouse
Timezone: Time ranges like Today & Yesterday now work correctly when timezone setting is set to UTC #8916, thx @ctide
Prometheus: Align $__interval with the step parameters. #9226, thx @alin-amana
Prometheus: Autocomplete for label name and label value #9208, thx @mtanda
Postgres: New Postgres data source #9209, thx @svenklemm
Datasources: closes #9371, #5334, #8812, thx @mattbostock

Minor Changes

SMTP: Make it possible to set specific EHLO for smtp client. #9319
Dataproxy: Allow Grafana to renegotiate tls connection #9250
HTTP: set net.Dialer.DualStack to true for all http clients #9367
Alerting: Add diff and percent diff as series reducers #9386, thx @shanhuhai5739
Slack: Allow images to be uploaded to slack when Token is present #7175, thx @xginn8
Opsgenie: Use their latest API instead of old version #9399, thx @cglrkn
Table: Add support for displaying the timestamp with milliseconds #9429, thx @s1061123
Hipchat: Add metrics, message and image to hipchat notifications #9110, thx @eloo
Postgres: modify group by time macro so it can be used in select clause #9527, thanks @svenklemm

Tech

Go: Grafana is now built using golang 1.9

What's New in Grafana v5.0

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v5.0

This is the most substantial update that Grafana has ever seen. This article will detail the major new features and enhancements.

New Dashboard Layout Engine enables a much easier drag, drop and resize experience and new types of layouts.
New UX. The UI has big improvements in both look and function.
New Light Theme is now looking really nice.
Dashboard Folders helps you keep your dashboards organized.
Permissions on folders and dashboards helps manage larger Grafana installations.
Group users into teams and use them in the new permission system.
Datasource provisioning makes it possible to setup datasources via config files.
Dashboard provisioning makes it possible to setup dashboards via config files.
Persistent dashboard url’s makes it possible to rename dashboards without breaking links.
Graphite Tags & Integrated Function Docs.

Video showing new features

New Dashboard Layout Engine

The new dashboard layout engine allows for much easier movement and sizing of panels, as other panels now move out of the way in a very intuitive way. Panels are sized independently, so rows are no longer necessary to create layouts. This opens up many new types of layouts where panels of different heights can be aligned easily. Checkout the new grid in the video above or on the play site. All your existing dashboards will automatically migrate to the new position system and look close to identical. The new panel position makes dashboards saved in v5.0 incompatible with older versions of Grafana.

New UX

Almost every page has seen significant UX improvements. All pages (except dashboard pages) have a new tab-based layout that improves navigation between pages. The side menu has also changed quite a bit. You can still hide the side menu completely if you click on the Grafana logo.

Dashboard Settings

Dashboard pages have a new header toolbar where buttons and actions are now all moved to the right. All the dashboard settings views have been combined with a side nav which allows you to easily move between different setting categories.

New Light Theme

This theme has not seen a lot of love in recent years and we felt it was time to give it a major overhaul. We are very happy with the result.

Dashboard Folders

The big new feature that comes with Grafana v5.0 is dashboard folders. Now you can organize your dashboards in folders, which is very useful if you have a lot of dashboards or multiple teams.

New search design adds expandable sections for each folder, starred and recently viewed dashboards.
New manage dashboard pages enable batch actions and views for folder settings and permissions.
Set permissions on folders and have dashboards inherit the permissions.

Teams

A team is a new concept in Grafana v5. They are simply a group of users that can be used in the new permission system for dashboards and folders. Only an admin can create teams. We hope to do more with teams in future releases like integration with LDAP and a team landing page.

Permissions

You can assign permissions to folders and dashboards. The default user role-based permissions can be removed and replaced with specific teams or users enabling more control over what a user can see and edit.

Dashboard permissions only limits what dashboards & folders a user can view & edit not which data sources a user can access nor what queries a user can issue.

Provisioning from configuration

In previous versions of Grafana, you could only use the API for provisioning data sources and dashboards. But that required the service to be running before you started creating dashboards and you also needed to set up credentials for the HTTP API. In v5.0 we decided to improve this experience by adding a new active provisioning system that uses config files. This will make GitOps more natural as data sources and dashboards can be defined via files that can be version controlled. We hope to extend this system to later add support for users, orgs and alerts as well.

Data sources

Data sources can now be setup using config files. These data sources are by default not editable from the Grafana GUI. It’s also possible to update and delete data sources from the config file. More info in the data source provisioning docs.

Dashboards

We also deprecated the [dashboard.json] in favor of our new dashboard provisioner that keeps dashboards on disk in sync with dashboards in Grafana’s database. The dashboard provisioner has multiple advantages over the old [dashboard.json] feature. Instead of storing the dashboard in memory we now insert the dashboard into the database, which makes it possible to star them, use one as the home dashboard, set permissions and other features in Grafana that expects the dashboards to exist in the database. More info in the dashboard provisioning docs

Graphite Tags & Integrated Function Docs

The Graphite query editor has been updated to support the latest Graphite version (v1.2) that adds many new functions and support for querying by tags. You can now also view function documentation right in the query editor!

Dashboard model, persistent url’s and API changes

We are introducing a new unique identifier (uid) in the dashboard JSON model. It’s automatically generated if not provided when creating a dashboard and will have a length of 9-12 characters.

The unique identifier allows having persistent URL’s for accessing dashboards, sharing them between instances and when using dashboard provisioning. This means that dashboard can be renamed without breaking any links. We’re changing the url format for dashboards from /dashboard/db/:slug to /d/:uid/:slug. We’ll keep supporting the old slug-based url’s for dashboards and redirects to the new one for backward compatibility. Please note that the old slug-based url’s have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

Sharing dashboards between instances becomes much easier since the uid is unique (unique enough). This might seem like a small change, but we are incredibly excited about it since it will make it much easier to manage, collaborate and navigate between dashboards.

API changes

New uid-based routes in the dashboard API have been introduced to retrieve and delete dashboards. The corresponding slug-based routes have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

What's New in Grafana v5.1

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v5.1

Grafana v5.1 brings new features, many enhancements and bug fixes. This article will detail the major new features and enhancements.

Improved scrolling experience
Improved docker image with a breaking change!
Heatmap support for Prometheus
Microsoft SQL Server as metric & table datasource!
Dashboards & Panels Improved adding panels to dashboards and enhancements to Graph and Table panels.
New variable interpolation syntax
Improved workflow for provisioned dashboards

Improved scrolling experience

In Grafana v5.0 we introduced a new scrollbar component. Unfortunately this introduced a lot of issues and in some scenarios removed the native scrolling functionality. Grafana v5.1 ships with a native scrollbar for all pages together with a scrollbar component for the dashboard grid and panels that’s not overriding the native scrolling functionality. We hope that these changes and improvements should make the Grafana user experience much better!

Improved docker image (breaking change)

Grafana v5.1 brings an improved official docker image which should make it easier to run and use the Grafana docker image and at the same time give more control to the user how to use/run it.

We’ve switched the id of the grafana user running Grafana inside a docker container. Unfortunately this means that files created prior to 5.1 won’t have the correct permissions for later versions and thereby this introduces a breaking change. We made this change so that it would be easier for you to control what user Grafana is executed as (see examples below).

Version	User	User ID
< 5.1	grafana	104

= 5.1 | grafana | 472

Please read the updated documentation which includes migration instructions and more information.

Prometheus

The Prometheus datasource now support transforming Prometheus histograms to the heatmap panel. Prometheus histogram is a powerful feature, and we’re really happy to finally allow our users to render those as heatmaps. Please read Heatmap panel documentation for more information on how to use it.

Prometheus query editor also got support for autocomplete of template variables. More information in the Prometheus data source documentation.

Microsoft SQL Server

Grafana v5.1 now ships with a built-in Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data source plugin that allows you to query and visualize data from any Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or newer, including Microsoft Azure SQL Database. Do you have metric or log data in MSSQL? You can now visualize that data and define alert rules on it like with any of Grafana’s other core datasources.

Please read Using Microsoft SQL Server in Grafana documentation for more detailed information on how to get started and use it.

Dashboards & Panels

Adding new panels to dashboards

The control for adding new panels to dashboards have got some enhancements and now includes functionality to search for the type of panel you want to add. Further, the control has tabs separating functionality for adding new panels and pasting copied panels.

By copying a panel in a dashboard it will be displayed in the Paste tab in any dashboard and allows you to paste the copied panel into the current dashboard.

Graph Panel

New enhancements includes support for multiple series stacking in histogram mode, thresholds for right Y axis, aligning left and right Y-axes to one level and additional units. More information in the Graph panel documentation.

Table Panel

New enhancements includes support for mapping a numeric value/range to text and additional units. More information in the Table panel documentation.

New variable interpolation syntax

We now support a new option for rendering variables that gives the user full control of how the value(s) should be rendered. In the table below you can see some examples and you can find all different options in the Variables documentation.

Filter Option	Example	Raw	Interpolated	Description
`glob`	${servers:glob}	`'test1', 'test2'`	`{test1,test2}`	Formats multi-value variable into a glob
`regex`	${servers:regex}	`'test.', 'test2'`	`(test.\|test2)`	Formats multi-value variable into a regex string
`pipe`	${servers:pipe}	`'test.', 'test2'`	`test.\|test2`	Formats multi-value variable into a pipe-separated string
`csv`	${servers:csv}	`'test1', 'test2'`	`test1,test2`	Formats multi-value variable as a comma-separated string

Improved workflow for provisioned dashboards

Grafana v5.1 brings an improved workflow for provisioned dashboards:

A populated id property in JSON is now automatically removed when provisioning dashboards.
When making changes to a provisioned dashboard you can Save the dashboard which now will bring up a Cannot save provisioned dashboard dialog like seen in the screenshot to the right.

Available options in the dialog will let you Copy JSON to Clipboard and/or Save JSON to file which can help you synchronize your dashboard changes back to the provisioning source. More information in the Provisioning documentation.

Changelog

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

What's New in Grafana v5.2

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v5.2

Grafana v5.2 brings new features, many enhancements and bug fixes. This article will detail the major new features and enhancements.

Elasticsearch alerting it’s finally here!
Native builds for ARM native builds of Grafana for many more platforms!
Improved Docker image with support for docker secrets
Security make your Grafana instance more secure
Prometheus with alignment enhancements
InfluxDB now supports the mode function
Alerting with alert notification channel type for Discord
Dashboards & Panels with save & import enhancements

Elasticsearch alerting

Grafana v5.2 ships with an updated Elasticsearch datasource with support for alerting. Alerting support for Elasticsearch has been one of the most requested features by our community and now it’s finally here. Please try it out and let us know what you think.

Native builds for ARM

Grafana v5.2 brings an improved build pipeline with cross-platform support. This enables native builds of Grafana for ARMv7 (x32) and ARM64 (x64). We’ve been longing for native ARM build support for ages. With the help from our amazing community this is now finally available. Please try it out and let us know what you think.

Another great addition with the improved build pipeline is that binaries for MacOS/Darwin (x64) and Windows (x64) are now automatically built and published for both stable and nightly builds.

Improved Docker image

The Grafana docker image adds support for Docker secrets which enables you to supply Grafana with configuration through files. More information in the Installing using Docker documentation.

Security

Starting from Grafana v5.2, when you login with the administrator account using the default password you’ll be presented with a form to change the password. We hope this encourages users to follow Grafana’s best practices and change the default administrator password.

Prometheus

The Prometheus datasource now aligns the start/end of the query sent to Prometheus with the step, which ensures PromQL expressions with rate functions get consistent results, and thus avoids graphs jumping around on reload.

InfluxDB

The InfluxDB datasource now includes support for the mode function which returns the most frequent value in a list of field values.

Alerting

By popular demand Grafana now includes support for an alert notification channel type for Discord.

Dashboards & Panels

Modified time range and variables are no longer saved by default

Starting from Grafana v5.2, a modified time range or variable are no longer saved by default. To save a modified time range or variable, you’ll need to actively select that when saving a dashboard, see screenshot. This should hopefully make it easier to have sane defaults for time and variables in dashboards and make it more explicit when you actually want to overwrite those settings.

Import dashboard enhancements

Grafana v5.2 adds support for specifying an existing folder or creating a new one when importing a dashboard - a long-awaited feature since Grafana v5.0 introduced support for dashboard folders and permissions. The import dashboard page has also got some general improvements and should now make it more clear if a possible import will overwrite an existing dashboard, or not.

This release also adds some improvements for those users only having editor or admin permissions in certain folders. The links to Create Dashboard and Import Dashboard are now available in the side navigation, in dashboard search and on the manage dashboards/folder page for a user that has editor role in an organization or the edit permission in at least one folder.

Changelog

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

What's New in Grafana v5.3

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v5.3

Grafana v5.3 brings new features, many enhancements and bug fixes. This article will detail the major new features and enhancements.

Google Stackdriver as a core datasource!
TV mode is improved and more accessible
Alerting with notification reminders
Postgres gets a new query builder!
OAuth support for GitLab is improved
Annotations with template variable filtering
Variables with free text support

Google Stackdriver

Grafana v5.3 ships with built-in support for Google Stackdriver and enables you to visualize your Stackdriver metrics in Grafana.

Getting started with the plugin is easy. Simply create a GCE Service account that has access to the Stackdriver API scope, download the Service Account key file from Google and upload it on the Stackdriver datasource config page in Grafana and you should have a secure server-to-server authentication setup. Like other core plugins, Stackdriver has built-in support for alerting. It also comes with support for heatmaps and basic variables.

If you’re already accustomed to the Stackdriver Metrics Explorer UI, you’ll notice that there are a lot of similarities to the query editor in Grafana. It is possible to add filters using wildcards and regular expressions. You can do Group By, Primary Aggregation and Alignment.

Alias By allows you to format the legend the way you want, and it’s a feature that is not yet present in the Metrics Explorer. Two other features that are only supported in the Grafana plugin are the abilities to manually set the Alignment Period in the query editor and to add Annotations queries.

The Grafana Stackdriver plugin comes with support for automatic unit detection. Grafana will try to map the Stackdriver unit type to a corresponding unit type in Grafana, and if successful the panel Y-axes will be updated accordingly to display the correct unit of measure. This is the first core plugin to provide support for unit detection, and it is our intention to provide support for this in other core plugins in the near future.

The datasource is still in the beta phase, meaning it’s currently in active development and is still missing one important feature - templating queries. Please try it out, but be aware of that it might be subject to changes and possible bugs. We would love to hear your feedback.

Please read Using Google Stackdriver in Grafana for more detailed information on how to get started and use it.

TV and Kiosk Mode

We’ve improved the TV & kiosk mode to make it easier to use. There’s now an icon in the top bar that will let you cycle through the different view modes.

In the first view mode, the sidebar and most of the buttons in the top bar will be hidden.
In the second view mode, the top bar is completely hidden so that only the dashboard itself is shown.
Hit the escape key to go back to the default view mode.

When switching view modes, the url will be updated to reflect the view mode selected. This allows a dashboard to be opened with a certain view mode enabled. Additionally, this also enables playlists to be started with a certain view mode enabled.

Notification Reminders

Do you use Grafana alerting and have some notifications that are more important than others? Then it’s possible to set reminders so that you continue to be alerted until the problem is fixed. This is done on the notification channel itself and will affect all alerts that use that channel. For additional examples of why reminders might be useful for you, see multiple series.

Learn how to enable and configure reminders here.

Postgres Query Builder

Grafana 5.3 comes with a new graphical query builder for Postgres. This brings Postgres integration more in line with some of the other datasources and makes it easier for both advanced users and beginners to work with timeseries in Postgres. Learn more about it in the documentation.

Improved OAuth Support for GitLab

Grafana 5.3 comes with a new OAuth integration for GitLab that enables configuration to only allow users that are a member of certain GitLab groups to authenticate. This makes it possible to use GitLab OAuth with Grafana in a shared environment without giving everyone access to Grafana. Learn how to enable and configure it in the documentation.

Annotations

Grafana 5.3 brings improved support for native annotations and makes it possible to use template variables when filtering by tags. Learn more about it in the documentation.

Variables

Grafana 5.3 ships with a brand new variable type named Text box which makes it easier and more convenient to provide free text input to a variable. This new variable type will display as a free text input field with an optional prefilled default value.

Changelog

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

What's New in Grafana v5.4

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v5.4

Grafana v5.4 brings new features, many enhancements and bug fixes. This article will detail the major new features and enhancements.

Alerting Limit false positives with the new For setting
Google Stackdriver Now with support for templating queries
MySQL gets a new query builder!
Graph Panel Highlight time regions and more
Team Preferences Give your teams their own home dashboard

Alerting

Grafana v5.4 ships with a new alert rule setting named For which is great for removing false positives. If an alert rule has a configured For and the query violates the configured threshold it will first go from OK to Pending. Going from OK to Pending Grafana will not send any notifications. Once the alert rule has been firing for more than For duration, it will change to Alerting and send alert notifications. Typically, it’s always a good idea to use this setting since it’s often worse to get false positive than wait a few minutes before the alert notification triggers.

In the screenshot you can see an example timeline of an alert using the For setting. At ~16:04 the alert state changes to Pending and after 4 minutes it changes to Alerting which is when alert notifications are sent. Once the series falls back to normal the alert rule goes back to OK. Learn more.

Additionally, there’s now support for disable the sending of OK alert notifications. Learn more.

Google Stackdriver

Grafana v5.3 included built-in support for Google Stackdriver which enables you to visualize your Stackdriver metrics in Grafana. One important feature missing was support for templating queries. This is now included together with a brand new templating query editor for Stackdriver.

The Stackdriver templating query editor lets you choose from a set of different Query Types. This will in turn reveal additional drop downs to help you find, filter and select the templating values you’re interested in, see screenshot for details. The templating query editor also supports chaining multiple variables making it easy to define variables that’s dependent on other variables.

Stackdriver is the first datasource which has support for a custom templating query editor. But starting from Grafana v5.4 it’s now possible for all datasources, including plugin datasources, to create their very own templating query editor.

Additionally, if Grafana is running on a Google Compute Engine (GCE) virtual machine, it is now possible for Grafana to automatically retrieve default credentials from the metadata server. This has the advantage of not needing to generate a private key file for the service account and also not having to upload the file to Grafana. Learn more.

Please read Using Google Stackdriver in Grafana for more detailed information on how to get started and use it.

MySQL Query Builder

Grafana v5.4 comes with a new graphical query builder for MySQL. This brings MySQL integration more in line with some of the other datasources and makes it easier for both advanced users and beginners to work with timeseries in MySQL. Learn more about it in the documentation.

Graph Panel Enhancements

Grafana v5.4 adds support for highlighting weekdays and/or certain timespans in the graph panel. This should make it easier to compare for example weekends, business hours and/or off work hours.

Additionally, when rendering series as lines in the graph panel, should there be only one data point available for one series so that a connecting line cannot be established, a point will automatically be rendered for that data point. This should make it easier to understand what’s going on when only receiving a single data point.

Team Preferences

Grafana v5.4 adds support for customizing home dashboard, timezone and theme for teams, in addition to the existing customization on Organization and user Profile level.

Specifying a preference on User Profile level will override preference on Team and/or Organization level
Specifying a preference on Team level will override preference on Organization level.

Changelog

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

What's New in Grafana v6.0

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v6.0

This update to Grafana introduces a new way of exploring your data, support for log data, and tons of other features.

The main highlights are:

Explore - A new query focused workflow for ad-hoc data exploration and troubleshooting.
Grafana Loki - Integration with the new open source log aggregation system from Grafana Labs.
Gauge Panel - A new standalone panel for gauges.
New Panel Editor UX improves panel editing and enables easy switching between different visualizations.
Google Stackdriver Datasource is out of beta and is officially released.
Azure Monitor plugin is ported from being an external plugin to being a core datasource
React Plugin support enables an easier way to build plugins.
Named Colors in our new improved color picker.
Removal of user session storage makes Grafana easier to deploy and improves security.

Explore

Grafana’s dashboard UI is all about building dashboards for visualization. Explore strips away all the dashboard and panel options so that you can focus on the query and metric exploration. Iterate until you have a working query and then think about building a dashboard. You can also jump from a dashboard panel into Explore and from there do some ad-hoc query exporation with the panel queries as a starting point.

For infrastructure monitoring and incident response, you no longer need to switch to other tools to debug what went wrong. Explore allows you to dig deeper into your metrics and logs to find the cause. Grafana’s new logging datasource, Loki is tightly integrated into Explore and allows you to correlate metrics and logs by viewing them side-by-side.

Explore is a new paradigm for Grafana. It creates a new interactive debugging workflow that integrates two pillars of observability—metrics and logs. Explore works with every datasource but for Prometheus we have customized the query editor and the experience to provide the best possible exploration UX.

Explore and Prometheus

Explore features a new Prometheus query editor. This new editor has improved autocomplete, metric tree selector, integrations with the Explore table view for easy label filtering, and useful query hints that can automatically apply functions to your query. There is also integration between Prometheus and Grafana Loki (see more about Loki below) that enabled jumping between metrics query and logs query with preserved label filters.

Explore splits

Explore supports splitting the view so you can compare different queries, different datasources and metrics & logs side by side!

Explore and Grafana Loki

The log exploration & visualization features in Explore are available to any data source but are currently only implemented by the new open source log aggregation system from Grafana Lab called Grafana Loki.

Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective, as it does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream. The logs from Loki are queried in a similar way to querying with label selectors in Prometheus. It uses labels to group log streams which can be made to match up with your Prometheus labels.

Read more about Grafana Loki here or Grafana Labs hosted Loki.

The Explore feature allows you to query logs and features a new log panel. In the near future, we will be adding support for other log sources to Explore and the next planned integration is Elasticsearch.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

New Panel Editor

Grafana v6.0 has a completely redesigned UX around editing panels. You can now resize the visualization area if you want more space for queries/options and vice versa. You can now also change visualization (panel type) from within the new panel edit mode. No need to add a new panel to try out different visualizations! Check out the video below to see the new Panel Editor in action.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Gauge Panel

We have created a new separate Gauge panel as we felt having this visualization be a hidden option in the Singlestat panel was not ideal. When it supports 100% of the Singlestat Gauge features, we plan to add a migration so all singlestats that use it become Gauge panels instead. This new panel contains a new Threshold editor that we will continue to refine and start using in other panels.

React Panels & Query Editors

A major part of all the work that has gone into Grafana v6.0 has been on the migration to React. This investment is part of the future-proofing of Grafana’s code base and ecosystem. Starting in v6.0 Panels and Data source plugins can be written in React using our published @grafana/ui sdk library. More information on this will be shared soon.

Google Stackdriver Datasource

Built-in support for Google Stackdriver is officially released in Grafana 6.0. Beta support was added in Grafana 5.3 and we have added lots of improvements since then.

To get started read the guide: Using Google Stackdriver in Grafana.

Azure Monitor Datasource

One of the goals of the Grafana v6.0 release is to add support for the three major clouds. Amazon CloudWatch has been a core datasource for years and Google Stackdriver is also now supported. We developed an external plugin for Azure Monitor last year and for this release the plugin is being moved into Grafana to be one of the built-in datasources. For users of the external plugin, Grafana will automatically start using the built-in version. As a core datasource, the Azure Monitor datasource is able to get alerting support, in the 6.0 release alerting is supported for the Azure Monitor service, with the rest to follow.

The Azure Monitor datasource integrates four Azure services with Grafana - Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Application Insights and Azure Application Insights Analytics.

Please read Using Azure Monitor in Grafana documentation for more detailed information on how to get started and use it.

Provisioning support for alert notifiers

Grafana now has support for provisioning alert notifiers from configuration files, allowing operators to provision notifiers without using the UI or the API. A new field called uid has been introduced which is a string identifier that the administrator can set themselves. This is the same kind of identifier used for dashboards since v5.0. This feature makes it possible to use the same notifier configuration in multiple environments and refer to notifiers in dashboard json by a string identifier instead of the numeric id which depends on insert order and how many notifiers exist in the instance.

Easier to deploy & improved security

Grafana 6.0 removes the need to configure and set up additional storage for user sessions. This should make it easier to deploy and operate Grafana in a high availability setup and/or if you’re using a stateless user session store like Redis, Memcache, Postgres or MySQL.

Instead of user sessions, we’ve implemented a solution based on short-lived tokens that are rotated frequently. This also replaces the old “remember me cookie” solution, which allowed a user to be logged in between browser sessions and which have been subject to several security holes throughout the years. Read more about the short-lived token solution and how to configure it here.

Please note that due to these changes, all users will be required to login upon next visit after upgrade.

Besides these changes we have also made security improvements regarding Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities:

Cookies are per default using the SameSite attribute to protect against CSRF attacks
Script tags in text panels are per default disabled to protect against XSS attacks

If you’re using Auth Proxy Authentication you still need to have user sessions set up and configured but our goal is to remove this requirement in the near future.

Named Colors

We have updated the color picker to show named colors and primary colors. We hope this will improve accessibility and helps making colors more consistent across dashboards. We hope to do more in this color picker in the future, like showing colors used in the dashboard.

Named colors also enables Grafana to adapt colors to the current theme.

Other features

The ElasticSearch datasource now supports bucket script pipeline aggregations. This gives the ability to do per-bucket computations like the difference or ratio between two metrics.
Support for Google Hangouts Chat alert notifications
New built in template variables for the current time range in $__from and $__to

Upgrading

See upgrade notes.

Changelog

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

What's New in Grafana v6.1

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:44:11 +0000

What’s New in Grafana v6.1

Highlights

Ad hoc Filtering for Prometheus

The ad hoc filter feature allows you to create new key/value filters on the fly with autocomplete for both key and values. The filter condition is then automatically applied to all queries on the dashboard. This makes it easier to explore your data in a dashboard without changing queries and without having to add new template variables.

Other timeseries databases with label-based query languages have had this feature for a while. Recently Prometheus added support for fetching label names from their API and thanks to Mitsuhiro Tanda implementing it in Grafana, the Prometheus datasource finally supports ad hoc filtering.

Support for fetching a list of label names was released in Prometheus v2.6.0 so that is a requirement for this feature to work in Grafana.

Permissions: Editors can own dashboards, folders and teams they create

When the dashboard folders feature and permissions system was released in Grafana 5.0, users with the editor role were not allowed to administrate dashboards, folders or teams. In the 6.1 release, we have added a config option so that by default editors are admins for any Dashboard, Folder or Team they create.

This feature also adds a new Team permission that can be assigned to any user with the editor or viewer role and lets that user add other users to the Team.

We believe that this is more in line with the Grafana philosophy, as it will allow teams to be more self-organizing. This option will be made permanent if it gets positive feedback from the community so let us know what you think in the issue on GitHub.

To turn this feature on add the following config option to your Grafana ini file in the users section and then restart the Grafana server:

[users]
editors_can_admin = true

Minor Features and Fixes

This release contains a lot of small features and fixes:

A new keyboard shortcut d l toggles all Graph legends in a dashboard.
A small bug fix for Elasticsearch - template variables in the alias field now work properly.
Some new capabilities have been added for datasource plugins that will be of interest to plugin authors:
- a new oauth pass-through option.
- it is now possible to add user details to requests sent to the dataproxy.
Heatmap and Explore fixes.

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

A huge thanks to our community for all the reported issues, bug fixes and feedback.

Guides on Grafana Labs

Basic Concepts

Basic Concepts

Data Source

Organization

User

Row

Panel

Query Editor

Dashboard

Getting Started

Getting started

Logging in for the first time

How to add a data source

Beginner guides

Basic Concepts

Top header

Dashboards, Panels, 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