Grafana Labs released the latest version of its flagship platform during GrafanaCON in Seattle, along with some other company announcements.

According to the company, Grafana 12 adds new observability as code features that will allow developers to version, validate, and deploy dashboards using code, reducing manual processes. 

Another new feature is Dynamic Dashboards, which provides a set of tools that can be used to easily display the right information at the right time. Developers can navigate dashboards using tabs that segment them by context, user group, or use case, or can use conditional rendering to show or hide panels or rows based on variable selections.

Other features in Grafana 12 include: 

  • The ability to natively manage alerts and recording rules
  • The ability to sync dashboards to GitHub
  • A new model for Grafana APIs that is consistent, versioned, and resource-oriented
  • Refactored table visualization that uses the react-data-grid library
  • Public preview of SCIM user and team provisioning
  • Private preview of SQL expressions
  • A new tool in Grafana Alerting that allows users to import Prometheus and Loki alert rules
  • Updates to Metrics and Logs Drilldown
  • Public preview of Investigations, a central view for correlating and analyzing signals from all Grafana Drilldown applications
  • Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant for moving from Grafana OSS or Grafana Enterprise to Grafana Cloud 
  • New themes

“We reimagined what it means to provision dashboards and how APIs and schema are structured,” said Torkel Ödegaard, co-founder of Grafana Labs. “These are fundamental changes that have become the basis for a range of improvements we’ve made to how users can interact with Grafana through code. With Grafana 12, we focused on providing everything users need to more easily and efficiently create and manage dashboards.”

Grafana Assistant in Grafana Cloud

In addition to releasing Grafana 12, the company also announced a private preview for Grafana Assistant in Grafana Cloud, an AI-powered chat experience for interacting with Grafana data.

Users can ask questions about their observability data; navigate to specific views for metrics, logs, traces, or profiles; make bulk changes to dashboards; create new dashboards using natural language; and conduct multi-step investigations by following leads in data.

“Grafana’s open source roots provide a unique advantage for our AI assistant; the wealth of content on the open web produced by our global community has enabled foundation models to be experts on Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki out-of-the-box. Our LLM-based agent was built to hit the ground running and provide meaningful assistance from day one,” said Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana Labs. 

Donation of Grafana Beyla to OpenTelemetry

Grafana Beyla is an eBPF-based, zero-code instrumentation tool, and the company started the process of donating it to OpenTelemetry about six months ago.

According to Grafana Labs, it decided to donate the project because it believed Beyla was capable of instrumenting and generating telemetry data in a way that other approaches weren’t. 

“This is when we understood that Beyla needs to become a true community-owned project under the OpenTelemetry umbrella,” said Nikola Grcevski, principal software engineer at Grafana Labs.

Beyla will be renamed to OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation, and after it has been donated to OpenTelemetry, it will continue to exist as Grafana Labs’ distribution of the upstream project. 

Grafana Drilldown for Traces now generally available

Grafana Drilldown is a set of tools for streamlining data exploration and analysis. It helps developers reduce the volume of data they need to sort through, and offers a point and click interface, eliminating the need to understand query languages. 

It was previously only available for Metrics, Logs, and Profiles, and is now generally available for Traces as well. 

Grafana k6 1:10

Grafana k6 is an open source performance testing tool that the company acquired back in 2021.

The latest version includes native TypeScript support, native extensions support, and modernized end-of-test summaries that contain scenario-specific metrics, hierarchical grouping, and improved checks results. 

Grafana Labs also now provides more clear support and versioning guarantees that follow Semantic Versioning principles.