What’s new in Grafana v11.5

Migrate your Grafana OSS/Enterprise instance to Grafana Cloud in just a few clicks.

The Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant launched in Grafana 11.2 with initial support for dashboards, data sources, and folders. We’re excited to announce support for plugins and Grafana alerts.

We’ve redesigned dashboard filters for an improved filter creation experience!

The redesigned filters are more prominent in the dashboard and filters based on the same ad hoc filter variable are more clearly related. In the new design, you can click anywhere in the filter field to begin creating a one and Grafana automatically detects which part of the filter you’re setting up. It takes fewer clicks to create a filter and the creation process using keyboard strokes is smoother than previously.

We’ve updated the Extract fields transformation with an additional RegExp format option you can use to perform more advanced parsing of the selected field, such as extracting parts of strings or splitting content into multiple fields using named capturing groups like /(?<NewField>.*)/.

Introducing a redesigned sharing experience in Dashboards! The redesigned sharing model is leaner, easier to navigate, and more focused on what you want to do.

Previously, the way you shared dashboards could be confusing, with various options like Link, Snapshot, Export, PDF, Report, and Public Dashboard all in one dialog box. The redesigned experience features a more visible and accessible Share button, options grouped based on common user needs, and a new Export option.

We’ve made some big changes to the panel image sharing experience. When you share a panel link, there’s a new Panel preview section where you can:

• Customize a panel image.
• See a preview of the panel image.
• Download and share the image without a URL.

You can customize the image by updating the width, height, and scale of it:

Choose the light or dark theme for PDF attachments and embedded dashboard images in Reports. The selected theme options are applied to PDFs and embedded images for all reports within your organization.

The Report branding section of the settings page is now called Attachment settings for clarity.

In May 2024, we announced a new way of generating PDFs that introduced a major performance improvement for the PDF export feature. It also fixed all caveats related to rendering a report with panels or rows set to repeat by a variable, like rendering repeating panels inside collapsed rows.

This new PDF generation method now replaces the old one and is generally available for everyone.

The feature flag alertingApiServer is now enabled by default.

In the UI, administrators have more granular control over which parts of notification settings users have access to.

Manage notification policies through Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Choose who can create, edit, and read notification policies using fixed roles.

You can only grant different access levels to the entire notification policy tree; not to individual notification policies.

The Elasticsearch data source plugin now offers support for Elasticsearch’s Cross-cluster Search feature.

If you’re a big Elasticsearch user, you might have multiple clusters set up for geographical separation, different teams or departments, compliance, or scaling reasons. Previously, you needed to set up a separate data source in Grafana for each cluster. Now with cross-cluster search, you can query data across all these clusters from a single Grafana data source. This makes it simpler and more convenient to query all of your Elasticsearch logs. You can learn more about this feature in the Elasticsearch docs.

Private Data Source Connect (PDC) is now supported across more AWS data source plugins - including:

• AWS Athena (Version 2.19.0)
• AWS Aurora (Version 0.4.0)
• OpenSearch (Version 2.21.0)
• AWS Redshift (Version 1.20.0)
• AWS X-Ray (Version 2.13.0)

With PDC, you can establish a private, secured connection between a Grafana Cloud instance, or stack, and data sources secured within a private network. Take advantage of the convenience and power of Grafana Cloud - even if your cluster is hosted in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or another private network.

Find the full list of supported data source plugins here.

It is now possible to create time series queries from the query builder in the following data sources. MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL. Use the Data operations drop-down to select a macro like $__timeGroup or $__timeGroupAlias.

Select a time column from the Column drop-down and a time interval from the Interval drop-down to create a time-series query.

We’ve improved how Grafana manages external sessions for OAuth and SAML, enhancing compatibility with identity providers that support session management.

Grafana can now reliably manage SAML external sessions (Identity Provider sessions) by using the SessionIndex attribute in the SAML assertion and the NameID attribute in the logout request. Previously, Grafana relied on the Login attribute as the NameID and did not include the SessionIndex in the logout request, which could result in users being logged out of all their applications/IdP sessions when logging out of Grafana.

The Plugin Frontend Sandbox is a security feature that isolates plugin frontend code from the main Grafana application. When enabled, plugins run in a separate JavaScript context, which provides several security benefits:

• Prevents plugins from modifying parts of the Grafana interface outside their designated areas
• Stops plugins from interfering with other plugins’ functionality
• Protects core Grafana features from being altered by plugins
• Prevents plugins from modifying global browser objects and behaviors

Plugins running inside the Frontend Sandbox should continue to work normally without any noticeable changes in their intended functionality.

We’ve renamed the Public dashboards feature, Shared dashboards. This renaming is part of our overall redesign of dashboard sharing and aims to better align externally shared dashboards with other dashboard sharing options.

The feature still functions the same way, but the configuration options that were previously part of public dashboards are now found in the Share externally option in the Share drop-down list.