What's new on Grafana Labs

What's new in Grafana v9.5

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 11:34:44 +0100

What’s new in Grafana v9.5

Welcome to Grafana 9.5! We’re excited to share some major updates to Grafana’s navigation, tons of usability improvements to Alerting, and some promising experiments to help you query your Prometheus metrics. Also, read on to learn about our continued migration from API keys to service accounts, as well as deprecation of plugins that use Angular and a field in the InfluxDB data source.

For more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog. For the specific steps we recommend when you upgrade to v9.5, check out our Upgrade Guide.

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

The navigation in Grafana has been updated with a new design and an improved structure to make it easier for you to access the data you need. With this update, you can quickly navigate between pages, giving you full visibility into the health of your systems.

As Grafana evolved from a visualization platform to a comprehensive observability solution, we added numerous tools to support users throughout the software development life cycle. These tools focus on preventing incidents, monitoring applications or infrastructure, and aiding incident response. However, the added functionality must be easily discoverable and navigable to be truly helpful. These key updates to Grafana’s navigation experience help address this:

A redesigned navigation menu that groups related tools together for easy access.
A command palette you can use to take actions in Grafana, like creating a dashboard or navigating to an app or page.
Updated layouts featuring breadcrumbs and a sidebar, allowing you to quickly jump between pages.
A new header that appears on all pages in Grafana, which includes a search function.

Join the discussion on GitHub and share your feedback.

Dashboards and visualizations

Redesigned empty dashboard state

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Dashboards have been updated so that it’s easier to begin building from scratch. The options displayed when you add a new dashboard—adding a visualization, a row, or importing panels—each include brief explanations of what those steps will do, so you can begin building with confidence.

Also, a text Add dropdown with these options has replaced the previous “+” icon at the top of the dashboard. This makes it clearer that this element allows you not only to add new panels, but to take all the actions associated with building a new dashboard.

Redesigned dashboard panel is generally available

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Dashboard panels contain a lot of information, some of which is difficult to discover or access from the dashboard. With our redesigned panels, we’ve improved accessibility and made it easier to understand the status of a panel by adding and moving key elements.

We’ve improved panels without titles, made panel descriptions and errors more succinct, and linked key actions from the header of the panel. All of these are laid out from left to right in a row, so there are no overlapping, unusable components.

Grafana’s new panel design is available only for React-based panels. No Angular-based panels, like the legacy Graph and Worldmap panels, are redesigned. As a reminder, Angular is deprecated in Grafana and will be removed in a future release. See our deprecation docs for more information.

Prometheus performance and usability improvements

Prometheus metric encyclopedia

Experimental in all editions of Grafana.

When you have thousands (or millions) of Prometheus metrics, it can be hard to find the exact one you’re looking for. Enable feature toggle prometheusMetricEncyclopedia to replace the basic metric select dropdown in the Prometheus query builder with a paginated and searchable metric encyclopedia.

Here’s what you can do with the metric encyclopedia:

Fuzzy search for metrics by name, type, and description
Filter metrics by Prometheus types (gauge, counter, histogram, summary)
Display metrics in a paginated list, sort the results, and choose a number of results per page, so that you don’t wait a long time for search results
View metric details, like type and description
[Expert feature] Search metric names by regex using the backend only

Prometheus browser cache

Experimental in all editions of Grafana.

New feature toggle prometheusResourceBrowserCache provides the ability to cache Prometheus editor API calls in the Prometheus data source configuration. This improves Prometheus query editor performance, with the biggest performance improvements seen by users with high cardinality Prometheus instances.

Removal of API key creation from the UI

With this update we are going one step further in deprecating API keys in favor of service accounts. We’ve removed the button for creating new API keys through Grafana’s user interface, and now only allow the creation of API keys using our HTTP API. We recommend that you migrate your existing API keys to service accounts, and opt for new service accounts instead of new API keys. This change is part of our long-term strategy for sunsetting API keys.

Learn more about the deprecation strategy for API keys and how to manage them in our Sunsetting API keys GitHub issue.

Resolve Grafana issues faster with support bundles

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Support bundles provide a simple way to collect information about your Grafana instance through Grafana’s user interface. In a few clicks, you can create a support bundle containing data about migrations, plugins, settings, and more. Once you’ve created a support bundle, you can either examine it yourself, or share it with your colleagues or Grafana engineers to aid in troubleshooting of your Grafana instance.

Learn more about support bundles and how to configure them in our support bundle documentation.

Alerting

All Alerting improvements are generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Search for alert rules from multiple data sources

Search for and display alert rules for multiple data sources at the same time.

Fuzzy search on the Alert rule list view

Search for namespaces or folders, evaluation groups, and alert rule names on the Alert rules list view with immediate results, and regardless of typos.

Access an alert rule from a dashboard or a panel

Navigate to an alert rule directly from a dashboard or a panel to easily access the alert rule details.

Access a dashboard or panel from an alert rule

Navigate from an alert rule straight to a dashboard or a panel associated with the alert rule to visualize your alerting data.

Preview queries for recording rules

Visualize queries when creating or editing recording rules, so you can see the results of your query before saving your recording rule.

Updated alert behavior when an evaluation returns no data

Alert rules that are configured to fire when an evaluation returns no data now only fire when the entire duration of the evaluation period has finished. This means that rather than immediately firing when the alert rule condition is breached, the alert rule waits until the time set in the For field has finished and then fires, reducing alert noise and allowing for temporary data availability issues.

Improved Notification policies view

Updates to the Notification policies view make it easier to use and manage in the following ways:

View default policy and nested policies at a glance
New tab for mute timings
View alert instances for each policy
View contact points and which integrations are configured for each policy
View inherited properties on nested policies
Search for label matchers and for contact points to see which notifications are going where

Guidance for configuring your Alertmanager

Get additional help while configuring your Alertmanager. If you enter an invalid Alertmanager configuration, an error message displays, and you can choose from a previous working configuration to restart it.

InfluxDB plugin database field deprecation

The database field in the provisioning file has been deprecated. This information will be stored in the jsonData field using the dbName property. The database field will be removed in the future to make InfluxDB consistent with other data sources. For more information and examples please refer to the InfluxDB Provisioning docs.

Auth: Lock organization roles synced from auth providers

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Grafana v9.4 provided the ability to configure synchronization of organization roles for each OAuth provider. With synchronization on, the organization role was applied to the user from the OAuth provider upon signing in. However, after the user signed in, you could still change the user’s organization role during the session.

With this release, we are reinforcing organization role syncing behavior by introducing a new feature toggle called onlyExternalOrgRoleSync. Once enabled, users signing in to Grafana cannot change organization roles that have been synchronized from an external authentication provider, like Active Directory or Google OAuth. This can help ensure the right users maintain the right level of access at all times.

This feature should be used if you want to enforce strict role synchronization from your auth provider to the organization roles.

To use this feature, enable the onlyExternalOrgRoleSync feature toggle. If you’re using Grafana Cloud and would like to enable this feature, please contact customer support. We’ll also be automatically enabling this feature for Grafana Cloud instances over the upcoming weeks.

You can also prevent the synchronization of organization roles from a given authentication provider. Learn more in our skip org role sync documentation.

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise, Cloud Pro, and Cloud Advanced.

We updated the reporting UI to better fit the new navigation style, adding a horizontal slider and moving the Preview and Send buttons to the Action section in the page. We also fixed the alignment of the different sections.

Experimental support for using JWTs as auth method

Experimental in Grafana Open Source and Enterprise.

This feature adds support for using JWT tokens to store rendering keys instead of relying on “remote caching”. It covers most rendering use cases, though some still rely on the remote cache as a store. You can enable this by enabling the feature flag renderAuthJWT in the custom.ini configuration file.

Note for plugin developers

One of the major changes coming in Grafana 10 will be our upgrade to React 18 and use of the new React client rendering API. There are many significant benefits we gain from this: access to new React features like transitions and concurrent rendering, as well as other general performance and security improvements. These changes have now been delivered to the core grafana repo with PR 64428.

As with any major upgrade, there’s a potential for this to impact the way your plugin works. In particular, there could be unintended side effects caused by the changes around improving consistency with useEffect timings and automatic batching of state updates.

Recommended actions:

Review the React 18 upgrade docs
Test your plugins against one of the latest grafana-dev docker images (for example, this one)
Add a comment to the forum discussion if your plugin is impacted in any way. Either to socialise the changes needed for your plugin or to reach out and ask for help yourself.

What's new in Grafana v9.4

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 11:34:44 +0100

What’s new in Grafana v9.4

Welcome to Grafana 9.4! Read on to learn about changes to search and navigation, dashboards and visualizations, and authentication and security. For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog.

We’ve made the following changes to search and navigation.

Command palette enhancements

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

The command palette has been updated to provide a more efficient way to navigate Grafana. You can now search and access all pages and recent dashboards, making it easier to perform tasks without taking your hands off the keyboard.

To launch the command palette, use the keyboard shortcut cmd + K on Mac or ctrl + K on Linux/Windows.

To learn more about the command palette, refer to Search.

Generally available on Grafana Cloud, and available to preview using the topnav feature toggle in all editions of Grafana.

The navigation in Grafana has been updated with a new design and an improved structure to make it easier for you to access the data you need. With this update, you’ll be able to quickly navigate between features, giving you full visibility into the health of your systems.

The new navigation is gradually rolling out to all users on Grafana Cloud. If you’re using Grafana Open Source and Enterprise, you can enable this feature using the topnav feature toggle.

Note: The Grafana documentation has not yet been updated to reflect changes to the navigation.

Note: Plugin developers should refer to the migration guide to upgrade their plugins to work seamlessly with the new navigation layout.

Dashboards and visualizations

We’ve made the following changes to dashboards and visualizations. Learn more about dashboards in our dashboards documentation.

Dashboard panel redesign

Available to preview using the newPanelChromeUI feature toggle in all editions of Grafana.

We’ve rethought the panel information architecture, added additional interaction points, and reduced visual clutter. To start, we’ve improved the support of panels without a header, made a distinction between details set by you and data-induced information, and then included all essential components in the header of the panel. All of these are laid out from left to right in a row, so there are no overlapping, unusable components.

Grafana’s new panel is available only for React-based panels; no Angular-based panels are redesigned. For example, Angular-based panel will still have the old Graph and Table visualizations.

Panel header redesign

However, we have more planned: we’re going to make even more improvements to the accessibility of panels and improvements to panels without a header.

New data source connection page in Dashboards and Explore

Available to preview using the datasourceOnboarding feature toggle.

When you start your journey to create a dashboard or explore your data, but you don’t have a data source connected yet, you’ll be shown a page that guides you to set up a first connection.

Administrators can choose between selecting one of the most popular data sources or viewing the entire list. Editors are guided to contact their administrator to configure data sources. In both cases, there’s also an option to continue without setting up a data source and to use sample data instead.

Log details redesign

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

We’ve updated the Details section of a log line. Previously some of the interactions, such as filtering, showing statistics, or toggling the visibility were split across Labels and Detected fields. With the recent changes those two sections are combined and the interactions are available for all fields.

Learn more about viewing logs in our Logs panel documentation.

Loki datasource query validation

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

We added support to validate queries and visually display errors as a query is being written, without having to execute it to receive this feedback. This feature supports single and multi-line queries, with and without variables.

Learn more about viewing logs in our Logs panel documentation.

Loki logs sample in Explore

Generally available in all editions of Grafana.

For Loki metric queries in Explore, you can now see the sample of log lines that contributed to the displayed results. To see these logs, click on the collapsed Logs sample panel under your graph or table panel. If you want to interact with your log lines or modify the log query, click on the “Open logs in split view” button and the log query will be executed in the split view.

Canvas panel

Available in beta in all editions of Grafana

Canvas is a new panel that combines the power of Grafana with the flexibility of custom elements. Canvas visualizations are extensible form-built panels that allow you to explicitly place elements within static and dynamic layouts. This empowers you to design custom visualizations and overlay data in ways that aren’t possible with standard Grafana panels, all within Grafana’s UI. If you’ve used popular UI and web design tools, then designing Canvas panels will feel very familiar.

In Grafana v9.4, we have added the ability to create connections (arrows). Connections enable you to connect elements together to create more complex visualizations. We also added support for data links and a brand new server element. To learn more about the Canvas panel, refer to Canvas.

Canvas panel connections

Auth and security

All auth updates are generally available in all editions of Grafana.

We’ve made the following changes to authentication and security.

Service account expiration dates

We have added a configuration option that enables you to require an expiration date limit for all newly created service account tokens.

This change will not affect existing tokens. However, newly created tokens will require an expiration date that doesn’t exceed the configuration option token_expiration_day_limit. This option is disabled by default.

Learn more about service accounts in our Service account documentation.

OAuth providers setting for skip org role sync

While Grafana integrates with many different auth providers, we have received requests for a feature that enables you to bypass organization role synchronization for individual providers rather than for all configured providers. This option is now available for users who want to be able to use Grafana to manage their org roles.

This option enables you to skip synchronization from your configured OAuth provider specifically in the auth provider section under skip_org_role_sync. Previously users could only do this for certain providers using the oauth_skip_org_role_sync_update option, but this would include all of the configured providers.

Learn more about Oauth in our Oauth configuration guide.

RBAC support for Grafana OnCall plugin

We’re rolling out RBAC support to Grafana plugins, with Grafana OnCall being the first plugin to fully support RBAC. Previously, Grafana OnCall relied on the Grafana basic roles (for example, Viewer, Editor, and Admin) for authorization within the plugin.

Before RBAC support in Grafana OnCall, it was only possible to allow your organization’s users to either view everything, edit everything, or be an admin (which allowed edit access plus a few additional behaviors). With this new functionality, organizations will be able to harness fine-grained access control within Grafana OnCall.

For example, you can assign a Viewer basic role to a user in your organization (users must still have a basic role assigned) and also assign them the new Grafana OnCall RBAC role of Schedules Editor. This assignment enables the user to view everything in Grafana OnCall, and edit OnCall schedules.

Learn more about role-based access control in our RBAC docs.

We’ve added auto-login support for SAML authentication, which you can turn on with the auto_login configuration option. We also have a unified configuration style among all authentication providers. Instead of using oauth_auto_login, use the new auto_login option to enable automatic login for specific OAuth providers.

Learn more about SAML setup in our SAML configuration guide.

Auditing and Usage Insights: Support for Loki multi-tenancy

This feature is available for Enterprise customers

This feature adds support to push analytics events and auditing logs to Loki with multi-tenancy mode, by specifying a tenant id. Learn more about auditing and usage insights in our docs.

Reporting: Zoom in and out on your dashboard in a report PDF

This feature is available for Enterprise customers

Zoom is a new feature for reports that allows you to change the dimension of the panels of the PDF document. It enables you to zoom out to show more columns in a table, or zoom in to enlarge panels. You can modify the scale factor for each report in the report editor when you share the PDF directly from the dashboard page.

Learn more about reporting in our documentation

Alerting

We’ve made major improvements to Grafana Alerts, from new contact points and search options to improved workflows between Alerting and OnCall. For all the details, refer to our Alerting documentation.

Alerting: alert rules

We’ve made the following changes to alert rules.

Declare incidents from firing alerts

Declare an incident from a firing alert, streamlining the alert to incident workflow.

Copy alert rules and notification templates

To help you reuse existing alert rules or templates, make copies of alert rules from the Alert rule list view and templates from the Contact points page.

View query definitions for provisioned alerts

View read-only query definitions for provisioned alerts from the Alert rule details page. Check quickly if your alert rule queries are correct, without diving into your “as-code” repository for rule definitions.

Export alert rules to use in the provisioning API or files

Create and tune an alert rule in the UI, then export to YAML or JSON, and use it in the provisioning API or files. You can also export an entire rule group to review or use. This is supported in both the UI and provisioning API.

Pause alert rule evaluation

Pause alert rule evaluation to prevent noisy alerting while tuning your alerts. Pausing stops alert rule evaluation and does not create any alert instances. This is different to mute timings, which stop notifications from being delivered, but still allow for alert rule evaluation and the creation of alert instances.

View an alert’s evaluation interval in Alert Group view

View the evaluation interval more easily from the grouped view on the Alert list page. The view now also always displays recording and normal alert rules and highlights alert rule status in different colors.

Improved search for your alert rules

When managing large volumes of alerts, use extended alert rule search capabilities to filter folders, evaluation groups, and rules. Additionally, you can filter alert rules by their properties like labels, state, type, and health.

Adjust the amount and resolution of data used in your alerting queries

Lower costs and improve performance by adjusting the maximum number of data points returned from your alerting queries.

Edit alert rule evaluation interval

Simplifies editing the evaluation interval for an alert rule within a new group. You no longer have to save the alert rule and group before editing the evaluation interval.

Alerting: contact points

We’ve made the following changes to alert contact points.

View Grafana OnCall contact point

Connecting your OnCall workflows just got easier. OnCall has been added as a contact point to simplify the integration between alert notifications and your OnCall implementation.

Alert email templating

We’ve improved the design and functionality of email templates to make template creation much easier and more customizable. The email template framework utilizes MJML to define and compile the final email HTML output. Sprig functions in the email templates provide more customizable template functions.

Add support for Discord as a contact point receiver

We’ve added Discord as a contact point receiver for Grafana Cloud alert rules.

Alerting: administration

We’ve made the following changes to alert administration.

Alerting landing page

Introduces a new landing page that helps you get started quickly with Alerting. It also provides you with at a glance information on how Alerting works and a video to introduce you to key concepts.

Compatibility with AWS Aurora

Grafana Alerting is now compatible with AWS Aurora, but does not provide technical support for it.

Enterprise Datasources

We’ve made improvements to all Enterprise Datasources, fixing small bugs, and updating libraries. We’ve also added many new features and support for additional APIs. Refer to each datasource’s documentation and the change log for additional information.

DataDog Datasource

We’ve added support for many new query types, including: SLO/SLI Values, RUM data, Events, and monitor group status.

Dynatrace Datasource

We’ve updated the Metric Selector to be faster and added support for filtering by management zone. We’ve also added support for Log Queries and querying the Dynatrace audit log.

GitLab Datasource

We’ve added support for many new query types, including: Audit events, Users, Merge request approvals, Field tags, Environments, and Pipelines.

Honeycomb Datasource

We’ve added support for derived columns and Honeycomb Environments.

NewRelic Datasource

We’ve added support for trace search, log search, and support for NRQL histogram queries.

Salesforce Datasource

We’ve added support for JWT authentication.

Snowflake Datasource

We’ve added support for custom session parameters.

Postgres, MySQL, and MSSQL data sources

The database property is now under the jsonData key in the data source configuration. This change is backward compatible, and existing configurations will continue to work.

Before you upgrade

There are no known breaking changes associated with this version of Grafana.

What's new in Grafana v9.3

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 11:34:44 +0100

What’s new in Grafana v9.3

Welcome to Grafana 9.3! Read on to learn about our navigation overhaul, support for four new languages, new panels and transformations, several often-requested auth improvements, usability improvements to Alerting, and more. For even more detail about all the changes in this release, refer to the changelog.

Available in beta in all editions of Grafana

Use Grafana’s redesigned navigation to get full visibility into the health of your systems, by quickly jumping between features as part of your incident response workflow.

As Grafana has grown from a data visualization tool to an observability solution, we’ve added many new features along the way. This has resulted in pages that are visually inconsistent or hard to find. These updates to navigation give Grafana a new look and feel and make page layouts and navigation patterns more consistent.

We’ve revamped the navigation menu and grouped related tools together, making it easier to find what you need. Pages in Grafana now leverage new layouts that include breadcrumbs and a sidebar, allowing you to quickly jump between pages. We’ve also introduced a header that appears on all pages in Grafana, making dashboard search accessible from any page.

To try out Grafana’s new navigation, enable the topnav feature toggle. If you are a Cloud Advanced customer, open a ticket with our support team and we will enable it for you.

Note: The Grafana and Grafana Cloud documentation has not yet been updated to reflect changes to the navigation - these changes will roll out when the new navigation becomes generally available.

View dashboards in Spanish, French, German, and Simplified Chinese

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We have added four new languages to Grafana: Spanish, French, German, and Simplified Chinese.

With millions of users across the globe, Grafana has a global footprint. In order to make it accessible to a wider audience, we have taken the first steps in localizing key workflows. You can now set Grafana’s language for the navigation, viewing dashboards, and some settings. This will cover the main activities a Viewer performs within Grafana.

Read more about configuring the default language for your organization and updating your profile in our documentation.

Geomap panel

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

We have added a new alpha layer type in Geomap called photo layer. This layer enables you to render a photo at each data point. To learn more about the photo layer and the geomap panel, refer to Photos layer.

Canvas panel

Available in beta in all editions of Grafana

In Grafana v9.3, we have added icon value mapping support to the Canvas panel. This enables you to dynamically set which icon to display based on your data. To learn more about the Canvas panel, refer to Canvas.

Canvas panel icon value mapping support

Public dashboards improvements

We’ve made the following improvements to public dashboards.

Manage all of your public dashboards in one place

Available in experimental in Grafana Open Source, Enterprise, and Cloud Advanced

You can use Public Dashboards to make a given dashboard available to anyone on the internet without needing to sign in. In Grafana v9.3, we have introduced a new screen where you can manage all of your public dashboards. From here, you can view a list of all of the public dashboards in your Grafana instance, navigate to the underlying dashboard, see if it is enabled, link out to the public version of the dashboard, or update the public dashboard’s configuration. You can see a public dashboard’s configuration if you have view access to the dashboard itself, and you can edit its configuration if you have the Admin or Server Admin role or the “Public Dashboard writer” role if you are using RBAC in Grafana Enterprise or Cloud Advanced.

To check out this new screen and configure your public dashboards, navigate to Dashboards > Public Dashboards.

Choose to display annotations in public dashboards

Available in experimental in Grafana Open Source, Enterprise, and Cloud Advanced

Annotations are now supported in public dashboards, with the exception of query annotations. They are turned off by default, but can be turned on in your public dashboard settings.

Note that because Public Dashboards is an experimental feature, you need to enable it in Grafana using the publicDashboards feature toggle, or open a support ticket requesting public dashboards if you are a Cloud Advanced customer.

To learn more about public dashboards, refer to Public dashboards.

New transformation: Partition by values

Available in experimental in all editions of Grafana

This new transformation can help eliminate the need for multiple queries to the same datasource with different WHERE clauses when graphing multiple series.

Consider a metrics SQL table with the following data:

Time	Region	Value
2022-10-20 12:00:00	US	1520
2022-10-20 12:00:00	EU	2936
2022-10-20 01:00:00	US	1327
2022-10-20 01:00:00	EU	912

Prior to v9.3, if you wanted to plot a red trendline for US and a blue one for EU in the same TimeSeries panel, you would likely have to split this into two queries:

   SELECT Time, Value FROM metrics WHERE Time > ‘2022-10-20’ AND Region=’US’
   SELECT Time, Value FROM metrics WHERE Time > ‘2022-10-20’ AND Region=’EU’

This approach also requires you to know ahead of time which regions exist in the metrics table.

With the partition by values transformer, you can issue a single query and split the results by unique (enum) values from one or more columns (fields) of your choosing. In this case, Region.

   SELECT Time, Region, Value FROM metrics WHERE Time > ‘2022-10-20’

Time	Region	Value
2022-10-20 12:00:00	US	1520
2022-10-20 01:00:00	US	1327

Time	Region	Value
2022-10-20 12:00:00	EU	2936
2022-10-20 01:00:00	EU	912

Reporting: Zoom in and out to fit your data better into a PDF

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise, Cloud Pro, and Cloud Advanced.

Because dashboards appear on a screen and reports are PDFs, it can be challenging to render data just the way you want to. Sometimes the report doesn’t show enough columns in a table, or the titles appear too small. Now you can adjust the scale of your report to zoom in and make each text field and panel larger or zoom out to show more data.

The zoom feature is located in the Format Report section of your reporting configuration. To learn more about reporting, refer to Create and manage reports.

Users and access

We’ve made the following improvements to users and access.

OAuth: token handling improvements

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

As part of our efforts to improve the security of Grafana, we are introducing a long-awaited feature that enhances Grafana’s OAuth 2.0 compatibility. When a user logs in using an OAuth provider, Grafana verifies on each request that the user’s access token has not expired. Grafana uses the refresh token provided (if any exists) when an access token expires to obtain a new access token.

Because this feature introduces a breaking change, it is behind the accessTokenExpirationCheck feature toggle and is disabled by default. Enabling this functionality without configuring refresh tokens for the specific OAuth provider will sign users out after their access token has expired, and they would need to sign in again every time.

Complete documentation on how to configure obtaining a refresh token can be found on the authentication configuration page, in the instructions for your Oauth identity provider.

Resolve user conflicts in Grafana’s CLI

In the older versions of Grafana, usernames were case-sensitive. This created conflicts, where a user might sign in using two different methods (like SAML and OAuth) and have two accounts created, like elastigirl@incredibles.com and ElastiGirl@incredibles.com. Users in this situation might think they have lost their preferences and permissions. If this has occurred in your Grafana instance, you can use a new Grafana CLI command to resolve user identity conflicts between users within Grafana.

Note: If you use Grafana Cloud or you run Grafana with MySQL as your database, you will not experience any user identity conflicts and you do not need to use this tool.

# lists all the conflicting users
$ grafana-cli user-manager conflicts list

# creates a conflict patch file to edit
$ grafana-cli user-manager conflicts generate-file

# reads edited conflict patch file for validation
$ grafana-cli user-manager conflicts validate-file <filepath>

# ingests the conflict users file. Can be executed once per file and will change the state of the database.
$ grafana-cli user-manager conflicts ingest-file <filepath>

LDAP: Role mapping improvements

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

If you use an LDAP directory to authenticate to Grafana but prefer to assign organizations and roles in the Grafana UI or via API, you can now skip user organization role synchronization with your LDAP directory.

Use the skip_org_role_sync LDAP authentication configuration option when configuring LDAP authentication to prevent the synchronization between your LDAP groups and organization roles and make user roles editable manually.

Azure AD OAuth2: New option to always fetch groups from the Graph API

Generally available in all editions of Grafana

If you use Azure AD OAuth2 authentication and use SecurityEnabled groups that you don’t want Azure to embed in the authentication token, you can configure Grafana to use Microsoft’s Graph API instead.

Use the force_use_graph_api configuration option when configuring Azure AD authentication to force Grafana to fetch groups using Graph API.

RBAC: List token’s permissions

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Cloud Advanced

We added a new endpoint to help users diagnose permissions-related issues with user and token authorization. This endpoint allows users to get the full list of RBAC permissions associated with their token.

For more details, refer to Debug the permissions of a service account token.

RBAC with Terraform: Extended support for provisioning permissions

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Cloud Advanced

All Grafana users can now use the latest release of Terraform’s Grafana provider (version 1.31.1+) to provision user and team access to service accounts.

This allows full management of service accounts through Terraform - from creating a service account and allowing users to access it to assigning roles to the service account and generating service account tokens.

Grafana Enterprise and Cloud Pro and Advanced users can now provision access to data sources for Grafana’s Viewer, Editor, and Admin basic roles, as well as assign Edit permission.

We have also added documentation on provisioning RBAC roles and role assignments to guide our Grafana Enterprise and Cloud Pro and Advanced users through this process.

Finally, we have fixed several access control related bugs to ensure a smoother provisioning experience.

Alerting

All of these new alerting features are generally available in all editions of Grafana.

Support for Webex Teams

You can now use Cisco Webex Teams as a contact point, to send alerts to a Webex Teams space.

Edit alert rules created using the provisioning API

Edit API-provisioned alert rules from the Grafana UI. To make a provisioned alert editable, add the x-disable-provenance header to the following requests when creating or editing your alert rules in the API:

POST /api/v1/provisioning/alert-rules

PUT /api/v1/provisioning/alert-rules/{UID}

Support values in notification templates

Add alert values to notification templates, so that you can create a single template that prints the annotations, labels, and values for your alerts in a format of your choice.

View notification errors

When an alert fails to fire, see when something is wrong with your contact point(s) and the reason for the error. The Receivers API contains information on the error, including a time stamp, duration of the attempt, and the error. You can also view the errors for each contact point in the UI.

Redesign of the expressions pipeline

We’ve redesigned the expressions pipeline editor to combine the expressions editor and the preview into a single view.

What's new in Grafana v9.2

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 11:34:44 +0100

What’s new in Grafana v9.2

Welcome to Grafana v9.2, a hefty minor release with a swath of improvements that help you create and share dashboards and alerts. Read on to learn about progress on public dashboards, our new panel help menu, custom branding in Grafana Enterprise, and improvements to access control. If you’d prefer to dig into the details, check out the complete changelog.

Available in beta in Grafana Open Source.

Dashboard panel issues can occur for all kinds of reasons, from problems processing data to issues with rendering or configuration. Shorten your communication time when reporting issues and requesting help from Grafana Labs by retrieving a panel’s query response data and panel settings. This will help the support team reproduce, diagnose, and fix the issue as quickly as possible. See our documentation for more info.

For details, see GitHub issue #55005 and “Send a panel to Grafana Labs support” in the documentation.

Canvas panel

Available in beta in Grafana Open Source.

Introducing the Canvas panel, a new panel that combines the power of Grafana with the flexibility of custom elements. Canvas visualizations are extensible form-built panels that allow you to explicitly place elements within static and dynamic layouts. This empowers you to design custom visualizations and overlay data in ways that aren’t possible with standard Grafana panels, all within Grafana’s UI. If you’ve used popular UI and web design tools, then designing Canvas panels will feel very familiar.

For example, you can place image layers and then overlay text that’s updated by Grafana data sources, and display icons that can change color conditionally based on data.

We’ve planned additional features and design elements for future releases to make Canvas panels even more powerful tools for creating custom, interactive, data-driven visualizations. To learn more about the Canvas panel, see the documentation.

Canvas panel beta overview

Support for Google Analytics 4 properties

Generally available in Grafana Open Source.

You can now use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track usage of Grafana. To enable tracking with GA4, specify your property’s measurement ID in Grafana’s configuration file. Read more in our documentation.

Google Analytics 4 replaces Universal Analytics, which will stop processing hits in 2023 (July 1 for free accounts, October 1 for Google Analytics 360). You can continue using Universal Analytics with Grafana and send analytics data to both types of properties.

Alertmanager updated to be based on Prometheus Alertmanager v0.24

Generally available in all editions.

The Alertmanager used for Grafana-managed alert rules is now based on the latest release of the Prometheus Alertmanager, v0.24. We continue to unify the different Alertmanagers that you can use with Grafana Alertmanager and will provide updates on this topic in a future release of Grafana.

For details, see GitHub pull request #53555.

Grafana Alerting alert rules now return an Error state by default on execution error or timeout

Generally available in all editions.

Error rules created with Grafana Alerting were previously switching to an Alerting state when the rule was facing an execution error or timeout. New error rules now switch by default to the Error state when failing to execute or timing out. You can change this default to either Alerting or OK.

This change does not update existing alert rules.

For details on this change, see GitHub pull request #55345. For more information about alerting states, see the alerting documentation.

Configure external alertmanagers as data sources

Generally available in all editions.

Starting with release 9.2, the URL configuration of external alertmanagers from the Admin tab on the Alerting page is deprecated. It will be removed in a future release.

External alertmanagers should now be configured as data sources using Grafana Configuration from the main Grafana navigation menu. This enables you to manage the contact points and notification policies of external alertmanagers from within Grafana and also encrypts HTTP basic authentication credentials that were previously visible when configuring external alertmanagers by URL.

Public dashboards

Available in Experimental in Grafana Open Source, Enterprise, Cloud Pro, and Cloud Advanced. To enable public dashboards, you must enable a feature flag or request this feature from support.

Public dashboards launched as an experimental feature in Grafana v9.1. We’ve received lots of great feedback on this much-anticipated feature and thank everyone who has helped us improve it. The team has been hard at work polishing public dashboards, and we’ve closed quite a few bugs related to community reports. If you’re trying out public dashboards, let us know how it is going in the open discussion in GitHub. Beyond bug fixes, we’re excited to share some new features:

Expression support

We have added the ability to use expressions for your public dashboards.

Public dashboard usage insights

Available in Experimental in Grafana Enterprise.

Usage Insights now has a “Public Dashboards” tab, which tracks how many people are viewing your public dashboard and how many queries have ran, and counts errors.

RBAC is available in Grafana Enterprise and Cloud Advanced.

We have introduced a new role called “Public Dashboard writer” that grants access to publish new public dashboards to additional roles and users. By default, only admins can share dashboards publicly.

Revamped UI for Google Cloud monitoring

Generally available in Grafana Open Source and Grafana Cloud Free, Pro, and Advanced.

The Google Cloud monitoring data source UI has been brought up to date with the latest Grafana UI design. This new interface provides a more consistent experience as you switch between different data sources. It also groups query builder items together more logically, so it’s easier to write queries. In the case of Cloud monitoring, the query builder’s groupings should more closely match the groupings in Google’s Cloud console.

App Plugins: better handling for secure fields

Plugin developers can mark certain fields as secure to encrypt those fields in Grafana’s database. This is important for sensitive fields like data source passwords or API keys. Previously, plugin developers needed to manually track which fields were labeled secure. We have extended our plugins platform to simplify this, which means one less thing for developers to worry about and better security for all users’ data. For details on using this functionality, see GitHub pull request #55313 and our plugin examples repository.

Transformations: INNER JOINs

Transformations allow you to shape raw data from data sources, like metrics series or GitHub issues, into a format that’s appropriate for the chosen visualization. We have extended the Join transformation to support INNER JOINs in addition to OUTER JOINs. These work similarly to SQL JOINs.

Also, you can now click on the x to clear values in the select fields for the OUTER JOIN and Grouping to Matrix transformations as expected.

Simplified UI to create template variable queries for Loki data source

Generally available in Grafana Open Source.

We have significantly simplified and improved the way you can create template variable queries for Loki data sources in dashboards. Use drop-downs to choose query type, label, and stream selector, without needing to worry about templating query syntax. For more information, refer to Loki data source documentation.

Authentication and authorization

Teams can be empty or without any Admin user

Generally available in all editions.

You can now leave a team empty without any users, or have only Members in a team. This helps you sync teams and users from a single sign-on provider like Active Directory or Okta, or if you use teams as collections of permissions. Previously, teams required at least one Admin user to be in a team.

Role-based access control is easier to use

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud Advanced.

Role picker when creating and editing teams

You can now choose a team’s roles and permissions when creating a new team or editing an existing team, which helps you grant permissions to teams more efficiently. Previously, you could assign roles only when looking at a list of all teams.

RBAC: Organize custom roles into groups

If you create many custom roles in Grafana – for example, different roles for editing specific dashboards or folders, or specific roles for certain teams in your company – you can now organize them into groups for more efficient navigation, browsing, and custom role assignment. For more information on custom roles, see the documentation.

RBAC: Terraform resource for assigning fixed and custom roles to users, teams, and service accounts

You can now assign fixed and custom roles to users, teams, and service accounts with the Grafana role_assignment resource in Terraform. This allows you to provision user permissions in a version-able, repeatable way if you use Terraform. Learn more in the documentation for Grafana’s Terraform provider.

SAML role mapping improvements

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise, Grafana Cloud Pro, and Advanced.

Map a user to all organizations in Grafana

You can now use * as the Grafana organization in the mapping to add all users from a given SAML Organization to all existing Grafana organizations. For more information, see “Configure SAML authentication” in the documentation.

Skip organization role sync

Generally available in Grafana Enterprise, Grafana Cloud Pro, and Advanced.

If you use a SAML identity provider to manage your users but prefer to assign roles and permissions in the Grafana UI or via API, you can now enable a configuration option to skip user organization and roles synchronization with your SAML provider.

Use the skip_org_role_sync configuration option when configuring SAML to prevent synchronization with SAML roles and make user roles editable from within Grafana.

For more information, see the SAML configuration documentation.

Assign Server Admin permissions from Oauth

You can now map OAuth groups and roles to Server Admin for the GitLab, GitHub, AzureAD, Okta, and Generic OAuth integrations. To enable this functionality, set the allow_assign_grafana_admin configuration option to true in the desired OAuth integration section. For more information, see the authentication configuration documentation for each OAuth client.

Match parameter support in prometheus labels API

Prometheus users running Prometheus v2.24 and higher can use the labels endpoint instead of the series endpoint for the label_values function. This decreases load times for templated high-cardinality Prometheus instances.

If you want to benefit from this endpoint you must first configure the Prometheus type and version in any Prometheus data sources’ configuration.

New Prometheus streaming parser

In Grafana v9.2, you can enable the prometheusStreamingJSONParser feature toggle to use a better-performing, memory-efficient streaming JSON client for Prometheus. We’ll make this client the default in Grafana v9.3.

When Prometheus returns NaN values, this new client doesn’t change them, neither to the value null nor to 0 as in recent Grafana versions. If you use this new Prometheus streaming parser with Grafana Managed Alerts, this change in behavior might trigger alerts. To avoid this, select the “Drop non-numeric values” option in the Reduce expression to drop NaN values.

What's new on Grafana Labs

What's new in Grafana v9.5

What’s new in Grafana v9.5

Grafana’s new navigation is generally available

Dashboards and visualizations

Redesigned empty dashboard state

Redesigned dashboard panel is generally available

Prometheus performance and usability improvements

Prometheus metric encyclopedia

Prometheus browser cache

Removal of API key creation from the UI

Resolve Grafana issues faster with support bundles

Alerting

Search for alert rules from multiple data sources

Fuzzy search on the Alert rule list view

Access an alert rule from a dashboard or a panel

Access a dashboard or panel from an alert rule

Preview queries for recording rules

Updated alert behavior when an evaluation returns no data

Improved Notification policies view

Guidance for configuring your Alertmanager

InfluxDB plugin database field deprecation

Auth: Lock organization roles synced from auth providers

Reporting UI adapted to match the new navigation style

Experimental support for using JWTs as auth method

Note for plugin developers

What's new in Grafana v9.4

What’s new in Grafana v9.4

Search and navigation

Command palette enhancements

New navigation

Dashboards and visualizations

Dashboard panel redesign

New data source connection page in Dashboards and Explore

Log details redesign

Loki datasource query validation

Loki logs sample in Explore

Canvas panel

Auth and security

Service account expiration dates

OAuth providers setting for skip org role sync

RBAC support for Grafana OnCall plugin

SAML auto login

Auditing and Usage Insights: Support for Loki multi-tenancy

Reporting: Zoom in and out on your dashboard in a report PDF

Alerting

Alerting: alert rules

Declare incidents from firing alerts

Copy alert rules and notification templates

View query definitions for provisioned alerts

Export alert rules to use in the provisioning API or files

Pause alert rule evaluation

View an alert’s evaluation interval in Alert Group view

Improved search for your alert rules

Adjust the amount and resolution of data used in your alerting queries

Edit alert rule evaluation interval

Alerting: contact points

View Grafana OnCall contact point

Alert email templating

Add support for Discord as a contact point receiver

Alerting: administration

Alerting landing page

Compatibility with AWS Aurora

Enterprise Datasources

DataDog Datasource

Dynatrace Datasource

GitLab Datasource

Honeycomb Datasource

NewRelic Datasource

Salesforce Datasource

Snowflake Datasource

Postgres, MySQL, and MSSQL data sources

Before you upgrade

What's new in Grafana v9.3

What’s new in Grafana v9.3

New navigation

View dashboards in Spanish, French, German, and Simplified Chinese

Geomap panel

Canvas panel

Public dashboards improvements