Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It’s been another big year for Grafana. In April, we unveiled Grafana 11.0 at GrafanaCon 2024, which introduced a queryless experience with Explore Metrics and custom visualizations with Canvas panels. Since then, we’ve made improvements to data sources and visualizations in our minor releases, and just last month the 11.3 release marked the general availability of Scenes-powered dashboards.

Grafana dashboards enable you to visualize and correlate data from a wide range of sources. With a centralized view of your data, you can troubleshoot faster, make better decisions, and streamline monitoring. But for those of you ramping up with Grafana, you might have a few questions about how, exactly, to create these rich dashboards featuring data from disparate sources, or even how to incorporate multiple queries from a single source into your visualization.

Over the past year, a lot of work has gone into making Prometheus work better with OpenTelemetry—a move that reflects the growing number of engineers and developers that rely on both open source projects. Historically, Prometheus users have faced a number of challenges when trying to work with OpenTelemetry (and vice versa).

As a product manager here at Grafana Labs, I’ve learned that sometimes the most powerful features can sneak by unnoticed, buried in those three little dots off to the side of the panel. But what happens when one of those hidden gems suddenly becomes the star of the show? Recently, we released a new Kubernetes Monitoring feature in Grafana Cloud—an alert system you can use to create alerts from panels in the app.

Though you might not immediately notice it the next time you log in, Grafana’s frontend has undergone a major upgrade. We recently migrated our dashboard architecture to utilize the Grafana Scenes library, enabling the creation of more stable, dynamic, and flexible Scenes-powered dashboards. Yes, the UI is pretty much the same, but under the hood, the engine responsible for visualizing the dashboards used by millions of people around the world has largely been rewritten.

A common pattern when building Grafana dashboards is to represent data for many items at once, such as simultaneously monitoring hundreds of servers. But what if there’s a problem with one of those servers? You’d want the ability to quickly identify that single server, and drill into the details without noise from all the other systems. In Grafana, dashboard variables are a great way to filter data and focus on the information that’s most important to you.

Grafana has grown to become one of the most prominent dashboarding tools available, with an extensive set of features that support organizations of all sizes. There can come a time, however, when you have too many dashboards. As a software engineer, you might think, “Why can’t I do with dashboards what I do with my code?” That is, you know how to keep your code in version control (e.g., Git). You know how to share and review your code with colleagues (e.g., pull requests).

In 2020, we introduced the GitHub data source plugin for Grafana, helping organizations visualize and gain deeper insights into their use of the popular version control and collaboration platform. Since then, thousands of users have installed the data source, and we’ve been working hard to extend its capabilities and make it even easier to use.

Modern websites typically have a backend API and a frontend user interface. Testing both is essential to deliver a reliable user experience and optimize engagement. Historically, Grafana Cloud k6 has helped you check one of these boxes, allowing you to test your website’s backend APIs with protocol tests. Now, we are excited to share that you can also validate your website’s frontend performance with the new browser testing feature in Grafana Cloud k6.

Roll out the red carpet! Grafana 11.3 is here and marks the general availability of Scenes-powered dashboards, which set the foundation for what we envision the future of Grafana dashboards will be. But the current state of Grafana dashboards looks pretty awesome as well. The dashboard experience has improved, including the ability to trigger API calls from any canvas element with the new Actions option across many visualizations.