What's new from Grafana Labs

We keep making it easier to manage incidents from anywhere — no laptop needed!

With this latest update, you can now dive into the full incident timeline directly from your phone. Instantly catch up on everything that’s happened: comments, notes, attachments, and key activity — all organised chronologically.

We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) release of Grafana Traces Drilldown, bringing a simplified, queryless experience to distributed tracing analysis. Building on months of public preview feedback and lessons learned from the Drilldown suite, this GA release delivers a refined, integrated solution for deep-dive trace analysis.

Key highlights

• Queryless exploration made simple: Traces Drilldown eliminates the need to write complex queries. Users can instantly access granular trace-level insights directly from their dashboards. This “queryless” design allows you to effortlessly connect the RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) golden signals with precise trace details.
• Seamless navigation: Enjoy a smooth transition between the high-level trace overview and deep dive span views. This unified navigation experience ensures that you maintain context as you shift from summary views to detailed analysis. This advanced drilldown capability improves incident analysis by providing the contextual insight needed for faster root cause identification.
• Built-in investigative tools: The Traces Drilldown interface features integrated filtering, highlighting, breakdowns, comparisons, and root cause correlation. These built-in tools enable rapid trace assessment by quickly spotlighting abnormalities without the need for external analysis tools.
• Detailed trace visualization: Once you’ve narrowed down your traces of interest, the trace view high-fidelity spans timeline reveals key metadata, duration, and status indicators, helping you quickly identify the origin of performance bottlenecks and errors.
• Unified observability experience: Traces Drilldown connects traces with logs, metrics, and profiles for a cohesive observability workflow. Effortlessly transition from an anomaly in logs or metrics into detailed trace views, enabling you to inspect spans and duration breakdowns to swiftly uncover underlying issues.

What’s new for GA

Exemplars

Pipelines in Grafana Fleet Management can now inject variable collector attribute values into their configurations. This powerful new feature enables you to create dynamic configurations that adapt to each collector’s characteristics, reducing the need for multiple similar pipelines.

Categorize your collectors with meaningful attributes, such as environment type, department, or location. Then inject these attributes into configuration pipelines using the syntax argument.attributes.value["ATTRIBUTE_KEY"]. With attribute injection, you can

• Create a single pipeline that works across different environments.
• Dynamically set labels based on collector attributes.
• Reduce the number of pipelines needed to manage your fleet.
• Make configurations more maintainable and scalable.

We’ve made several updates to the IRM settings to give administrators greater visibility and control:

• Renamed the Organization settings to Admin & API.
• Added Admin-level setting to enable or disable the availability of notification channels (such as Slack or MS Teams) across all user profiles.
• Deprecated OnCall API tokens in favor of Grafana Cloud service accounts. Existing OnCall API tokens can still be used, viewed, and deleted, but new tokens can no longer be generated.

We’ve made it easier to understand ownership and take action immediately when a service looks off. The latest update to Grafana Service Center brings IRM (incident response management) context directly into the service details view. You can now quickly see who’s on-call and escalate issues without leaving Service Center.

When a team is assigned to a service and has an active on-call schedule, the service details page shows:

• Who is currently on call
• Their local time and whether they’re within working hours
• Quick-access actions like Slack DM and escalation

Grafana’s dashboard schema has stayed mostly the same for years, originally built around a single grid layout. Over time, it became more complex and harder to work with, mixing different concerns and adding unnecessary complications. In Grafana v12, we’re introducing a new dashboard schema.

With this new architecture based on Scenes, we’re simplifying the schema to make it easier to understand and support powerful new features, like dynamic dashboards, tabs, and canvas-style layouts. The new schema also aims to simplify dashboard management, supporting the as-code approach of Git provisioning.

In the middle of an incident? Deploying a service? Would having every log line available help?

Now with Pause Adaptive Logs, end users of logs can temporarily ingest the logs they need for the service, application, or cluster they care about, without needing to configure anything in Adaptive Logs or work with their centralized team. Get all the cost savings benefits of Adaptive Logs, while making sure your dev teams aren’t stranded during an Incident!

We continue adding more functionality to the IRM mobile app to make incident management smoother and more flexible, allowing you to react instantly from anywhere.

You can now manage incident roles directly from your phone!

We’re giving the community early access to several new experimental themes to celebrate the release of Grafana 12! You can jazz up your Grafana experience with Sapphire dusk, Tron, Gilded grove, Gloom, or Desert bloom. To see the color scheme of a theme before selecting it, click the user icon in the top-right corner of the page and select Change theme.

This opens the Change theme drawer, where you can view all themes:

Last year, we migrated our dashboard architecture to the Scenes library, unlocking a more stable, dynamic, and flexible foundation for the future of Grafana dashboards. Today, we’re excited to showcase what the team has built on top of it, with a strong focus on improving core user workflows: navigating, consuming, and editing dashboards.

More efficient navigation and consumption

• Tabs for better organization: Build well-structured dashboards with tabbed layouts for different contexts and user groups.
• Conditional rendering: Show or hide visualizations based on variable selections or data availability, ensuring relevance. 
• Dashboard content outline: Navigate dashboards fast with this tree structure, making it easier to jump between sections.

Powerful dashboard editing

• New flexible panel layout options: Use custom or auto-grid panel layouts with adjustable settings, like column count, for adaptive dashboard behavior.
• Tabs and row grouping: Group panels into rows or tabs based on your needs. Nested grouping to support complex visual needs is also supported.
• Context-aware editing: Quickly modify tabs or rows, panels, and variables without diving into full edit mode.
• Intelligent side pane: The side pane user interface adapts to your selection, enabling fast actions like duplicating elements or setting layout options.

This is an experimental feature and should not be used in production environments, as it might result in a loss of data. If you are interested in enabling Dynamic Dashboards, please fill out this form.

Introducing new controls for Logs in Explore

We’re excited to introduce a new controls component for Logs in Explore, designed to make better use of the layout around logs, and give users greater flexibility when working with log data.

Dynamic Alerting with our Forecasting and Outlier Detection features now supports role-based access control by introducing the new roles ML Editor, ML Viewer, Sift Editor and Sift Viewer.

ML Editors can:

• Create/edit/delete forecasts and outlier detectors
• Create/edit/delete holidays

We’ve enhanced our GitHub Actions integration for k6, making it even easier to run performance tests seamlessly within your CI/CD pipelines.

Now, when executing k6 tests in the cloud from a GitHub Actions workflow, the pull request comments will automatically display a rich test summary. This includes key performance metrics like response times, request rates, pass/fail statuses and comparison with the baseline test runs—providing instant, actionable insights without leaving your development workflow.

We are excited to announce that you can now use Terraform to manage Frontend Observability resources.

You can configure a Terraform provider to connect to the Frontend Observability API and manage resources, such as applications.

Grafana Fleet Management now offers an audit trail of configuration pipeline changes. With the Pipelines history feature, your team can collaborate more efficiently, ensure audit compliance, and troubleshoot issues caused by configuration changes.

You can view all changes across all pipelines, review changes to a specific pipeline, compare differences between change events for a pipeline, or copy configuration syntax to revert to an earlier version of a pipeline.