What's next from Grafana Labs

The built-in MinIO subchart is deprecated in the Loki Community Helm chart, and will be removed on 2026-10-31. Setting minio.enabled=true without also setting ignoreMinioDeprecation: true causes chart rendering to fail with chart v17+. For production, configure an external object storage backend.

What is changing

Grafana is deprecating the [security] x_xss_protection setting. When the release containing this change reaches your self-managed instance, Grafana logs a deprecation warning on startup if the setting is enabled. Its default is true, so the warning can appear even if you have not set the option explicitly.

The upstream specification for the Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) recently renamed the field AgentConfigFile to AgentConfigObject. This update creates a breaking change for anyone relying on the Fleet Management Collector HTTP API to retrieve a collector’s effective configuration.

What is changing

On October 26, 2026, Agentic testing is being removed from Testing & synthetics. We’re taking this work into Grafana Assistant as a new experience. You won’t be able to view, edit, or re-run the tests it generated, and you can’t export those definitions. Recreate any journeys you still need before that date. Results from past runs stay in the Agentic Testing project until your retention window ends.

The legacy role-based access control (RBAC) HTTP API will let authorized role managers revoke access without holding the permissions being removed. This applies when you remove permissions from a role, delete an editable custom role, or remove role assignments from users or teams. Each operation will still require its management permissions.

If you delegate role management or use integrations with /api/access-control/ endpoints, review who should have this broader revocation authority. Otherwise, you don’t need to take action.

Custom labels in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring now attach directly to every check metric and log - not only the sm_check_info metric - and the label_ prefix is removed.

The dashboard-specific endpoints for starring and unstarring a dashboard are deprecated in favor of the generic Collections Stars API, which stars any kind of resource through one shared endpoint shape instead of a separate endpoint per resource kind.

The old endpoints still work, but are now marked deprecated:

• POST /api/user/stars/dashboard/uid/{dashboard_uid} (star a dashboard)
• DELETE /api/user/stars/dashboard/uid/{dashboard_uid} (unstar a dashboard)

The replacement is:

• PUT /apis/collections.grafana.app/v1alpha1/namespaces/{namespace}/stars/user-{your_user_uid}/update/dashboard.grafana.app/Dashboard/{dashboard_uid} (star)
• DELETE /apis/collections.grafana.app/v1alpha1/namespaces/{namespace}/stars/user-{user_uid}/update/dashboard.grafana.app/Dashboard/{dashboard_uid} (unstar)

No request body is needed; the star target is fully described by the URL path.

Grafana Loki deprecated several legacy multi-store backends in release 3.0 The following legacy storage backends have been removed in Loki 4.0:

• Apache Cassandra
• Amazon DynaomoDB
• BoltDB (for indexes)
• Google BigTable
• gRPC Store

Loki 4.0 will fail to start if a deprecated and removed storage backend is referenced in the schema or storage configuration.

The Loki release 3.4 introduce new object storage clients based on the Thanos Object Storage Client Go module. For several Loki releases this was opt-in and only took effect only when -use-thanos-objstore was set to true. In Loki 4.0 -use-thanos-objstore is set to `true` by default.

We deprecated mulit-storage backends in Loki 3.0 and they have been removed for Loki 4.0. Table manager is only needed if you are using a multi-store backend. Starting with Loki 4.0, the single store TSDB is the only supported Loki index. TSDB has been the recommended Loki index since Loki v2.8, and it does not need the table manager.

Simple Scalable Deployment mode is being deprecated and removed in Loki 4.0. The write, read, and backend targets, as well as the configuration option -legacy-read-mode will not be available any more and Loki will fail to start if used.
Users must migrate to monolithic mode, distributed mode, or the new HA Monolithic mode being introduced in Loki 4.0.

The CSV and JSON API data sources are deprecated. Both plugins move into a critical-security-updates-only phase: they keep receiving critical security fixes, but no new features or non-security bug fixes. Support for both data sources ends February 1, 2027.

The Parca data source is deprecated. The plugin moves into a critical-security-updates-only phase: it keeps receiving critical security fixes, but no new features or non-security bug fixes. Support ends January 2, 2027.

Kubernetes Monitoring will let you give an AI agent access to the queries behind its own pages, such as the ones that count Nodes, total the CPU used by a namespace, and calculate cost. A new AI agent access tab in the Configuration page will hold a prompt you copy into your agent’s configuration.

If you upgrade gcx from v0.4.x or earlier, there are breaking changes to be aware of:

1. Commands are renamed across many providers, with no aliases. Old spellings fail as unknown commands. Behaviour, flags, positional arguments, output schemas, and exit codes are unchanged, only the names moved. The aim is to make a more predictable and understandable command surface. Here are all the changes: