What's next from Grafana Labs

Starting January 4, 2027, Grafana Cloud keeps dashboard and API annotations for 13 months. Annotations older than that are deleted automatically, and requests to create new annotations older than 13 months, based on timeEnd, will be rejected. The change applies to all Grafana Cloud plans and rolls out gradually, so older annotations on your stack might not be removed on January 4 exactly.

The legacy Annotations API (/api/annotations) is deprecated in favor of a new Annotations API at /apis/annotation.grafana.app/v0alpha1. The new API uses the same structure as Grafana’s newest APIs, with each annotation as its own resource that you can create, read, update, patch, and delete, plus dedicated search and tags endpoints.

The legacy API still works. Grafana isn’t disabling legacy /api endpoints yet. They remain available, but won’t be updated. Removal of legacy APIs is planned for a future major release, and any breaking changes will be announced well in advance to avoid disruptions.

Starting November 5th, 2026, edit mode for dashboards will no longer be available on a mobile phone. Dashboards will become view-only on a phone.

Editing on a tablet is not affected: tablets keep full dashboard edit mode, with the same feature set as desktop.

The self-service API that let Grafana Cloud users configure a limited number of Loki configuration settings has been deprecated. It has been replaced by the Database configuration app, which provides a user interface for making database configuration changes in Grafana Cloud.

What is changing

The Plugin Frontend Sandbox was a public preview feature which provided an additional layer of security by restricting what plugins could access and modify. Following the public preview period, we have decided not to progress this feature to general availability, and are deprecating it in Grafana v13.3 with the intent to fully remove it in Grafana v13.4. Grafana OSS and Enterprise users with the feature enabled will now see a deprecation warning in the server logs on startup.

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.