What's new from Grafana Labs

We’ve updated the Extract fields transformation with an additional RegExp format option you can use to perform more advanced parsing of the selected field, such as extracting parts of strings or splitting content into multiple fields using named capturing groups like /(?<NewField>.*)/.

This new feature groups labels and folders in one step so that you can more easily organize your Grafana-managed alert rules.

Private Data Source Connect (PDC) is now supported across more AWS data source plugins - including:

• AWS Athena (Version 2.19.0)
• AWS Aurora (Version 0.4.0)
• OpenSearch (Version 2.21.0)
• AWS Redshift (Version 1.20.0)
• AWS X-Ray (Version 2.13.0)

With PDC, you can establish a private, secured connection between a Grafana Cloud instance, or stack, and data sources secured within a private network. Take advantage of the convenience and power of Grafana Cloud - even if your cluster is hosted in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or another private network.

Find the full list of supported data source plugins here.

Choose the light or dark theme for PDF attachments and embedded dashboard images in Reports. The selected theme options are applied to PDFs and embedded images for all reports within your organization.

The Report branding section of the settings page is now called Attachment settings for clarity.

Many teams struggle with selecting a realistic SLO target when creating or modifying SLOs. The target sets the sensitivity for when an SLO will start to burn budget, impacting alerting noise and “error budget remaining”. If you assume you want to create an SLO to ensure “99.5% of HTTP requests return successfully in under 500 ms”, how do you know that 99.5% is a realistic target for your service? People often guess or take a number from management.

Grafana SLO in collaboration with the Machine Learning team is proud to announce a major enhancement to our SLO creation wizard. After defining an SLI, the “step 2” target selection page now shows a computed likelihood estimate to help users select a realistic target. We query 90 days of history from the metrics used in the SLI definition, and run simulations to predict the likelihood of meeting a given target given the history of the metrics. The user can slide the target percentage and see an updated prediction of the likelihood of meeting or breaching that target.

It is now possible to create time series queries from the query builder in the following data sources. MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL. Use the Data operations drop-down to select a macro like $__timeGroup or $__timeGroupAlias.

Select a time column from the Column drop-down and a time interval from the Interval drop-down to create a time-series query.

We’ve introduced a new section under Settings > Push Notifications to ensure reliable delivery of notifications by actively prompting users to disable battery optimization and inactivity restrictions on Android devices.

Here’s what’s new:

Starting in early 2025 we will roll out eight new public probe locations running in AWS: Stockholm, Zurich, Spain, UAE, Montreal, Calgary, Hyderabad, and Indonesia.

These eight new regions will replace the remaining eight locations running out of Linode and Digital Ocean: Atlanta, Dallas, Newark, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Bangalore. These regions are deprecated and will be removed between January 27 and February 14, 2025. Exact dates and times will be posted as maintenance notices on our status page.

Why are we doing this?

We’ve redesigned dashboard filters for an improved filter creation experience!

The redesigned filters are more prominent in the dashboard and filters based on the same ad hoc filter variable are more clearly related. In the new design, you can click anywhere in the filter field to begin creating a one and Grafana automatically detects which part of the filter you’re setting up. It takes fewer clicks to create a filter and the creation process using keyboard strokes is smoother than previously.

We’re excited to announce the release of Grafana IRM Mobile, the next evolution of our mobile app which was previously known as Grafana OnCall. This rebrand marks a major step forward in providing teams with a seamless, comprehensive way to manage incidents—all from your mobile device.

Beyond Alerts: Embracing Incidents

While the Grafana OnCall mobile app enabled on-call engineers to never miss an alert and stay on top of their on-call schedules, we heard that you wanted even more power when on the move.

Correlations is a feature that allows Grafana users to set up links between their data sources. Previously, the link generated would only be from one query to another—meaning results from a query could only generate links to open a second Explore pane with other query results.

With this feature, users can now link to third party web-based software based on their search results. The format follows the standard Grafana format for using variables.

We’re excited to announce that plugins can now leverage Grafana’s role based access control to define their own roles and permissions in order to control access to their routes.

To define roles and their default assignments, plugin developers need to add a roles section to their plugin.json file. Grafana will automatically register these roles and assign them to the corresponding basic roles: Viewer, Editor, Admin, and Grafana Admin.

A new escalation step is now available in Grafana OnCall. You can configure your escalation chains to automatically create an incident in Grafana Incident with a specified severity.

If a critical alert group is identified (outside of the default route), and earlier steps in the escalation chain don’t resolve the issue, the chain will now declare an incident as part of the response process.

Explore Logs is a plugin that lets you automatically visualize and explore your logs without having to write queries. It makes finding spikes in your log volume, filtering your logs and pinpointing problematic log lines a lot easier and more smooth.

While Explore Logs is GA in cloud and installed by default already, with Grafana v11.3.0 it will be automatically installed on your on-prem instance as well. This will let you use Explore Logs alongside Explore Metrics.

Introducing the Series limit in the Metrics browser.

On occasion, a Prometheus instance may contain a metric that has many, many series. When this happens the metrics browser can become slow or break when searching labels on a metric.