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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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: