What's new from Grafana Labs

We’re excited to roll out three powerful enhancements to TraceQL, giving you more flexibility and performance when querying traces in Grafana Cloud with Tempo.

• Rank your metrics with new topk(n) and bottomk(n) functions to quickly get your highest and lowest ranking time series.
• Aggregate spans over time using sum_over_time() for built-in cumulative sums, such as total bytes, error counts.
• Fetch the latest traces first via the experimental most_recent=true query hint.

Ranking topk and bottomk functions for TraceQL metrics

When you’re looking at latency, error rates, or throughput across hundreds or thousands of services or endpoints, it’s easy to get lost in all the data. Previously, you’d have to pull back the full set of aggregates and then manually inspect or post‑process the results to find your worst offenders or best performers.

Segmentation allows customers to manage their Adaptive Metrics recommendations on a team, service, or system level, allowing for more granular management of Adaptive Metrics.

You can define label-based segments via a GUI, API, or Terraform. Each segment will then receive its own recommendations; rules and exemptions can then be managed per segment.

Logs Drilldown now contains a JSON viewer for structured log lines. With this new feature, users can more easily view, interact, and of course drill down into their JSON data. This table enables users to filter their JSON log lines so that they can view just the data they need in places like the Log Volume visualization.

Upgrade your Grafana experience with a direct connection with GitHub.

Connect your instance to a GitHub repository, and manage your dashboards as code directly from the Grafana UI. By enabling Git Sync, you will be able to manage dashboards the same way you manage your code. Dashboards will be versioned in Git, and edited through a PR workflow, so that it’s always possible to track changes.

We’ve simplified the migration of data source-managed alert rules to Grafana-managed alert rules.

Using these tools and APIs, you can import data source-managed alert rules from Prometheus-compatible systems (Prometheus, Mimir, Loki) into Grafana as Grafana-managed alert rules. This simplifies migrating from data source alerts to Grafana Managed Alerts while preserving behavior of the rules. Alert rules can be imported from an easy-to-use UI tool or through API endpoints compatible with Mimirtool.

Flapping alerts can cause noise and obscure other issues. Now you can set the minimum amount of time that an alert remains firing after the breached threshold expression no longer returns any results. This sets an alert to a “Recovering” state for a duration of time so a re-triggered threshold incurred during this period won’t trigger a new alert.

You can now restore or permanently delete recently deleted Grafana-managed alert rules. Go to Alerts & IRM > Alerting > Recently deleted to see this function in action.

The table visualization panel just got a major performance boost. Load, sort, and filter large tables many times faster than before, now that the table visualization has been refactored to use the react-data-grid library.

If the feature flag for dynamic dashboards is enabled, once an existing dashboard is migrated to a dynamic dashboard and using schema v2, it can’t be migrated back. This issue will be solved in future versions of Grafana.

We were double registering the existing metric cache_size. In Grafana v12 we’re deprecating the metric, with plans to remove it in Grafana v13, and splitting it into 2 different metrics:

We’re removing the deprecated version of the UI extension APIs in favor of the new reactive APIs introduced in Grafana v11.4. The new APIs enable Grafana to load plugins with UI extensions lazily when needed instead of needing to load them prior to starting Grafana. They also make the UI reactive, so when the UI extensions registry changes, it will be reflected in the UI.

We’ve had a standard way to define UIDs for Grafana objects for several years. While all of our internal code complies to this format, we didn’t yet have strict enforcement of this format in REST APIs and provisioning paths that allow the creation and update of data sources.

Use the full power of SQL to manipulate and combine results from data sources however you like. You can use it to create new dashboard visualizations and powerful alert and recording rules.

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.

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.