What's new from Grafana Labs

Aggregate by was introduced as a way to view RED metrics for your traces in the Tempo data source. This functionality has been deprecated since Grafana v11.3 in favor of using Traces Drilldown and the TraceQL metrics API, which offers much more functionality and complex features. Additionally, TraceQL metrics queries are significantly more powerful than what the metrics summary API provides.

Migration/mitigation

RED metrics are supported via Traces Drilldown and can be viewed with more advanced context than via the older metrics summary API. For all users, the aggregate by section will no longer be present in the Tempo data source search tab. Additionally, any user that had been using the aggregate by functionality in the Tempo data source in a dashboard can manually change the Tempo query.

Angular plugin support was deprecated and turned off by default in Grafana 11 and is now being removed Grafana v12. This means, effective in Grafana v12, there is no possibility anymore to use any Angular plugins in Grafana and the dashboards that were still using “core” Angular panels will be force-migrated to the latest versions that are using React.

For more information, refer to our blog post and documentation.

Actions were introduced as an optional property for the DataLinksContextMenu in October 2024 to support actions in the context menu for the table visualization. Actions were under a feature flag, so the impact is minimal. There’s no other way to use the property from other places that are using the DataLinksContextMenu component, so we expect the effect to be minimal.

If any, the impact would be that actions are not displayed in the context menu of the table visualization.

Migration/mitigation

Grafana Cloud has a page in the Admin section that displays feature toggles. A feature toggle is a way to enable or disable certain features before they are generally available. The feature toggle UI shows which toggles are on or off, with options to enable or disable some of those toggles. This UI is experimental.

We are removing this experimental page from Grafana Cloud since we are replacing our current feature toggle system with one that is more robust, and the new system is incompatible with the UI.

We are excited to announce SCIM user and group provisioning.

Previously, provisioned users needed to individually sign in to Grafana to exist within the platform, and administrators faced the time-consuming task of creating and managing teams - either manually or via provisioning. This process was complicated and often presented a bottleneck for new team members getting up and running quickly.

With this release we’re rethinking our dashboards APIs and introducing a new model that is consistent, versioned, and resource-oriented. We’re releasing them as experimental, with the intent to gather feedback and deliver a stable version to users with one of the next releases.

The new APIs make Git Sync possible, and are the key change that power our new Terraform provider and the creation of the GrafanaCTL CLI tool. Right now, only dashboards, folder, and other few elements like announcement banners and playlists are leveraging this new model, and we plan to expand it to all Grafana resources.

We’re excited to announce that the Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant is now generally available to all users! After a successful public preview period, this powerful tool is ready to transform how self-managed Enterprise customers and OSS users transition to Grafana Cloud.

Simplifying Your Migration Journey

This brand new feature, coming to Public Preview in Grafana v12, is designed to streamline how you approach problem-solving by bringing all your relevant signals together in one unified view.

Centralized Signal Analysis for Efficient Investigations

• Add Panels from Any Signal: Investigations breaks down the silos between our Drilldown applications. You can now seamlessly add panels from Metrics, Logs, and Traces Drilldown directly into a single investigation view.
• Side-by-Side Comparison Across Time: Gain deeper insights by comparing the behavior of your signals across two distinct timeframes, all within the same view. This allows for the rapid identification of correlations and anomalies.
• Effortless Collaboration: Investigations make it easy to share your findings and the context of your analysis with other team members involved in the same task, fostering better collaboration and faster resolution.

Investigations provides a central hub to correlate and analyze diverse signals across the otherwise siloed Drilldown applications, leading to more efficient and effective troubleshooting.

Last October at ObsCon, we announced the GA of Logs Drilldown, and we’ve been hard at work expanding its capabilities to help you visualize your logs data with more flexibility and options.

Enhanced Visualization and Filtering Capabilities

• Multiple Include Filters: You can specify multiple inclusion filters within your Drilldown queries, allowing for more nuanced and targeted log retrieval.
• Regex Support: We’ve added support for regular expressions in label and field queries, providing robust and flexible pattern matching for in-depth log analysis.
• JSON Visualization: Explore and understand your JSON-formatted log entries with our new dedicated JSON visualization, making complex data structures easier to read and interpret.
• Service Selection Pagination: The service selection is now paginated, making it easier for users to view and discover service related data.
• Sort order changes query direction: Sort order and query direction are now linked, using a new query direction “Forward” from Loki. Setting “Oldest first” will query your log data in the order of oldest log to most recent. Setting “Newest first” will query your logs from a “Backwards” direction (i.e. newest log line to oldest).

With these new features in Logs Drilldown, we’re empowering you to gain clearer insights from your log data by supporting a wider range of formats and offering more powerful filtering and visualization options.

At ObsCon last October, we announced the GA of Metrics Drilldown, and we’ve been hard at work expanding its capabilities to help you reduce the number of metrics you need to manage with just a few clicks.

Faster Filtering

• Prefix and Suffix Filters: Refine your metric exploration with the new prefix and suffix filter options, enabling more precise targeting of the data you’re looking for.
• Group By Labels: Organize and understand your metrics more effectively by grouping them based on their labels. This provides valuable context and simplifies analysis.
• Sort Options: Tailor your view by sorting metrics based on recent history, associated dashboards, and related alerts. This allows you to prioritize and investigate efficiently.

Improved UI

• Collapsible Sidebar: We’ve introduced a collapsible sidebar, allowing you to focus on the data that matters most by providing more screen real estate for filtering.
• Better Metric Count: We now provide a real-time count of the metrics displayed after each filtering action, giving you immediate feedback on the impact of your selections.

With these enhancements to Metrics Drilldown, we continue our commitment to providing powerful tools to streamline your observability workflows and gain deeper insights into your systems.

Effective starting in Grafana 12.0, the configuration option editors_can_admin is removed. 

The editors_can_admin setting in Grafana allows users with the Editor role to create and manage Grafana Teams.  Editors in instances with this configuration setting no longer have these extra privileges.

Troubleshooting with traces just got a lot faster in Grafana Cloud. Trace correlations lets you configure custom, context-aware links straight into every span in the trace view. With a single click, you can now jump from a trace to:

• Logs filtered by the same trace or service fields
• Metrics focused on the exact service, endpoint, or error condition
• Profiles for CPU, memory, or heap snapshots tied to a span
• Dashboards, runbooks, tickets, or any external URL that enriches your workflow

All it takes is a quick rule in Correlations. Simply define which span or trace fields to use as variables, point to your target, and watch contextual links appear in the Explore trace view.

We are excited to announce the public preview of native histograms!

Native histograms are a metric type in Prometheus that can produce, store, and query high-resolution histograms of observations. They usually offer higher resolution and more straightforward instrumentation than classic histograms.

We’re excited to announce that k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are now generally available.

k6 browser checks allow you to go beyond traditional monitoring, enabling you to test and validate real user flows and gain insight into performance in ways you can’t with HTTP-level checks. With browser checks, you’re not just monitoring performance at a protocol level; you’re simulating user interactions that provide you with a much richer view of your app’s behavior in production.

You can define custom labels at the scrape job level across all services in a job, making it easier to:

• Attribute costs
• Track ownership
• Apply consistent metadata

Especially valuable for teams without direct access to AWS tagging, this feature:

• Centralizes label management
• Reduces duplication
• Removes the need for manual, error-prone configuration