What's new from Grafana Labs

Drilling down into your data across a dashboard has traditionally meant working with basic filter controls, re-entering the same filters you used yesterday, and losing track of which filters are active when many are applied. Introducing the new Filter and Group by dashboard control to tackle all of these friction points and make dashboard exploration faster and more intuitive.

SQL Expressions let you combine and transform data across multiple queries using familiar SQL-joining results, computing ratios, and filtering before aggregating. But to use it, you had to know the feature existed, learn that your query names become table names, and get the MySQL-dialect syntax right yourself.

In Grafana 12.2.0, we introduced two new settings for controlling audit log emission for data source queries: log_datasource_query_request_body and log_datasource_query_response_body, which logs the request and response body payloads respectively.

Styling panels in Grafana used to require a lot of manual work: editing each panel individually, or duplicating one just to reuse its look and then swapping out the query. With the new copy-paste styles feature, you can copy the styling from one panel and apply it to another in just a couple of clicks.

Data source APIs that referenced data sources using a numeric id were deprecated in Grafana v9.0 in favor of APIs that reference data sources using a uid instead. In Grafana v13.0, these deprecated APIs are disabled by default.

Grafana Advisor is now generally available in Grafana v13.0.

You can use Advisor to uncover issues affecting the health of your Grafana instances, such as:

• Data sources with a failing health check that will result in failed queries
• Outdated plugins, which might be insecure or lacking the latest fixes and features
• Misconfigured SSO settings

Checks run once a week by default and can be triggered manually from the Advisor home page. You can also configure alerts to inform you when new issues arise.

The following Prometheus metrics are now deprecated in Grafana v13, and will be removed in a future release:

• go_sql_stats_connections_max_open
• go_sql_stats_connections_open
• go_sql_stats_connections_in_use
• go_sql_stats_connections_idle
• go_sql_stats_connections_waited_for
• go_sql_stats_connections_blocked_seconds
• go_sql_stats_connections_closed_max_idle
• go_sql_stats_connections_closed_max_lifetime
• go_sql_stats_connections_closed_max_idle_time
• grafana_database_conn_max_open
• grafana_database_conn_open
• grafana_database_conn_in_use
• grafana_database_conn_idle
• grafana_database_conn_wait_count_total
• grafana_database_conn_wait_duration_seconds
• grafana_database_conn_max_idle_closed_total
• grafana_database_conn_max_idle_closed_seconds
• grafana_database_conn_max_lifetime_closed_total

They are replaced by the following metrics, which provide the exact same data:

• go_sql_max_open_connections
• go_sql_open_connections
• go_sql_in_use_connections
• go_sql_idle_connections
• go_sql_wait_count_total
• go_sql_wait_duration_seconds_total
• go_sql_max_idle_closed_total
• go_sql_max_idle_time_closed_total
• go_sql_max_lifetime_closed_total

We previously announced in a blog post that the Grafana Image Renderer plugin was deprecated back in September 2025.

Starting from Grafana 13, support for the plugin is fully removed and it no longer works for rendering screenshots or scheduled reports.

Previously, the enable_gzip configuration option in the [server] section of the Grafana configuration file, which enables HTTP compression, was disabled by default with the recommendation that most users manually enable it. Starting in Grafana v13.0, this setting is enabled by default.

In Grafana v13.0, we’re removing several components deprecated since 2023 from the @grafana/ui package:

• Graph
• GraphWithLegend
• GraphContextMenu
• GraphContextMenuHeader
• graphTimeFormat
• graphTickFormatter
• GraphSeriesToggler
• GraphSeriesTogglerAPI

We’re also removing one component deprecated since January 2026:

The grafana-cli and grafana-server commands were deprecated in Grafana v10.0 in favor of the grafana cli and grafana server commands. Until now, both sets of commands were usable.

Previously, the Image Renderer authenticated with Grafana instances by using opaque tokens stored in the Grafana database in order to navigate to panels and dashboards to generate screenshots and PDFs.

Grafana alerting has added single-node alert evaluation for high availability clusters. When enabled, only one Grafana instance in the HA cluster evaluates alert rules, reducing query load on data sources.

Normally, when you run multiple instances of Grafana, all alert rules are evaluated on all instances by default. With single-node evaluation enabled, the Grafana cluster automatically chooses a primary instance that is responsible for evaluating all alert rules. Other instances skip evaluation entirely.

With single-node evaluation, the primary instance broadcasts fired alerts to all other instances through the cluster communication channel. This ensures that every instance’s embedded Alertmanager has the current alerts, which is necessary for failure recovery and for the Alertmanager API to return correct data on all instances.

The config.apps and config.panels properties from the @grafana/runtime package are deprecated and scheduled for removal in Grafana 13.2.0, scheduled for the second half of 2026.