Version 2.4 release notes

Grafana Labs is excited to announce the release of Grafana Enterprise Metrics (GEM) 2.4, which is built on top of Grafana Mimir 2.4.

GEM 2.4 inherits all of the features, enhancements, and bugfixes that are in the Grafana Mimir 2.4 release. Given this, it’s best to start with the Grafana Mimir 2.4 release notes.

Note: Mimir 2.4, and by extension GEM 2.4, includes a system that optionally and anonymously reports non-sensitive, non-personally identifiable information about the running GEM cluster to a remote statistics server. This feature is turned on by default. For more information about the type of data that is collected, refer to Which information is collected. To opt out, refer to Disable the anonymous usage statistics reporting.

Features and enhancements

Fixed CVE-2022-44643
CarbonAPI is now being used instead of MetricTank as the default native query engine for the Graphite querier. This can be changed by setting -graphite.querier.querier-carbonapi-rollout-fraction=0.
Added optional rate limiting capabilities to the Graphite querier. This can be configured using the flags -graphite.querier.rate-limit-enabled, -graphite.querier.rate-limit-qps, -graphite.querier.tenant-rate-limit-qps and -graphite.querier.heavy-rate-limit-qps.
Added a new flag -graphite.querier.cache-ttl to the Graphite querier to configure the TTL of cached metric names and aggregation configs.

Helm changes

The mimir-distributed Helm chart is the best way to install GEM on Kubernetes. Notable changes follow. For the full list of changes, see the Helm chart changelog.

Ingresses for the GEM gateway and nginx will no longer render on Kubernetes versions <1.19
Added support for topologySpreadConstraints to all components, including the GEM gateway, admin-api, and alertmanager, which did not have podAntiAffinity previously.

Upgrade considerations

The GEM docker image no longer requests the CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE capability because the default HTTP port was changed from 80 to 8080.
- If you set -server.http-listen-port or -server.grpc-listen-port to a value that is lower than 1024, then you need to modify your configuration:
  - When using Docker, provide the flag --cap-add net_bind_service.
  - When using the mimir-distributed Helm chart, make sure that all the GEM components have the following additional securityContext setting in their respective values file sections:
    yaml
    securityContext: sysctls: - name: net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start value: "0" # or lowest http/grpc listen port number

This release also inherits the upgrade considerations from the Grafana Mimir 2.4 release.

After you upgrade to GEM 2.4, upgrade your GEM plugin to the latest version. For more information about the most recent enhancements and bugfixes in the GEM plugin, see the Grafana Enterprise Metrics: Changelog.