Documentation Rolling release channels for Grafana Cloud

Rolling release channels for Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud, like most SaaS cloud products, releases and deploys software continuously. To ensure the quality of our deployments, we use rolling release channels (RRCs) with different update schedules. This model enables Grafana Labs to quickly respond and mitigate security vulnerabilities, and to ship features fast so they can reach a wide customer base. The main benefit of this model is that customers receive security fixes and new features without having to manually upgrade like you need to do if you choose our self-managed offering.

What is a rolling release channel?

A rolling release channel is a release method where fixes and changes “roll” through each release channel on a different cadence. Grafana Labs implements a schedule to update the rolling release channels. Instances are distributed among three channels with the following three update speeds:

• Fast is updated daily during weekdays.
• Steady is updated weekly, usually each Tuesday.
• Slow is updated on the fourth Monday of the month.

This schedule is subject to change due to circumstances like infrastructural incidents or critical bug fixes. In particular, we cannot guarantee that a given channel will be rolled out exactly on the scheduled day (sometimes earlier, sometimes later).

Which channel am I on?

You can view the channel your instance is on at the bottom of the Grafana Cloud login screen.

If you’re already logged in to an instance, click the question mark (?) icon at the top right of the screen and select help from the dropdown menu.

Can I change my channel?

Customers on account tiers other than the Free Forever tier, who want to have early access to upcoming changes in Grafana, can move some or all of their non-production instances to the Fast channel.

Having a non-production instance on the Fast channel allows you to interact with new features and fixes in a safe place to familiarize yourself with them and determine their impact before they’re pushed to production. You can also choose to have production instances on any release cadence, based on how fast you would like to see changes in the production environment. You should evaluate how you want to balance faster delivery of changes and features with having a more gated approach and running your own tests.

The slower the channel selected for production, the more time features and fixes have to roll through the release channels which means they’re being used more. As a result, features and fixes become more resilient and stable due to being used by other customers, while also going through a series of tests that are performed to prove the stability of the release as they pass through to the next channel.

While we take great care in ensuring that known bugs and issues will not reach the Slow channel, it might still happen due to the nature of software development. In these cases, we will act as quickly as we can to fix the issue.

To change the rolling release channel for your instances, please contact Support by opening a ticket in the Grafana Cloud Portal. Free Forever accounts are not able to select a channel other than the one assigned.

Frequently asked questions

1. Where do I see what new features are available to me?
   What’s coming in Cloud can be found in What’s New Cloud
2. How do I know which channel my instance is in? Currently you can see the release channel you’re on in the page footer, but you cannot self-select a different one.
3. How do I ask to switch channels?
   If you’re an Enterprise or Advanced customer and want one or all of your instances to be on a different release channel, please contact Support. Free users are not able to change their channel.
4. If I report an issue, can that be classed as a “Critical bug”?
   Triage of issues belongs to engineering, and so does the classification. If the issue you reported is classified as a critical one, we will deal with it according to our internal Service Level Objectives.
5. Which Grafana Labs products follow this model?
   In our LGTM stack, only core Grafana products and features follow this release cadence, for example, dashboards and common components like folders and RBAC. Cloud Logs, Cloud Metrics, and Cloud Traces, which are based on our database projects, Loki, Mimir, and Tempo, do not have an RRC-like cadence. Cloud features like Grafana Incident or Grafana SLO, and plugins like data sources, are also updated independently.