DEVOPSdigest

Grafana Labs released Grafana 7.0 with significant enhancements to simplify the development of custom plugins and drastically increase the power, speed and flexibility of visualization.

This latest release helps organizations realize their monitoring, visualization and observability goals even faster.

Grafana 7.0 is an accumulation of effort commencing after 6.0 spanning nearing 18,000 commits and 3,699 pull requests from 362 contributors around the world. Additionally, there are hundreds of company, commercial and community data-source plugins and thousands of sample dashboards.

The Grafana 7.0 enhancements heavily focus on helping users and organizations across these key areas:

• (Easier to) Connect and Unify All Your Data

- The new Amazon CloudWatch Logs plugin joins the slate of plugins resulting from partnerships across Google (Google Cloud Monitoring (formally Stackdriver)), Microsoft (Azure Monitor), and Amazon (Amazon CloudWatch). The release includes new logs support with open source Loki and tracing inputs from Zipkin and Jaeger. These augment Grafana’s existing community and enterprise commercial plugins ranging from the recently released ServiceNow enterprise plugin to popular open source projects (like Prometheus, Graphite and Elasticsearch) and proprietary sources (such as Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, Zabbix, Oracle), as well as users’ own custom data sources/API.

- New component libraries, tools, data structures and a completely rebuilt common and unified data and plugin framework based on Apache Arrow provide consistent data structure and significantly reduce the effort required to develop plugins.

• (Much More Power and Control to) Process and Transform Your Data

- Transformations allow users to rename, summarize, combine, and perform calculations across queries and data sources.

- A shared set of common data operations that were previously duplicated as custom features in many panels or data sources are now an integral part of the Grafana data processing pipeline and something all data sources and panels can take advantage of.

- New data inspection feature lets users see, export (CSV), and drill into query execution details for faster troubleshooting.

• (Faster Ways to) Visualize Your Data… Even Traces

- A new tracing viewer to complement the existing support for metrics and logs enables users to trace the path of a single request through a distributed system.

- A range of automatic and easy-to-use rendering options drastically simplifies effort and results in dashboard panels in a variety of formats including tables, non-time-series charts and more. This augments the significant library of existing panel plugins including maps, pie charts and gauges.

- New panel options, new edit experience, and new table panel along with easier resizing.

• Search, Discover, and Secure Your Dashboards with New Enterprise Features

- Okta and SAML team syncs.

- Out-of-the-box searching and dashboard reporting for usage trends to more easily identify inactive and popular dashboards.

- Ability to identify concurrent dashboard users for faster collaboration.

“This is truly a major release for us — not just a .0 or laundry list of features, but a fundamental, system-wide advancement. With this release, users are going to experience an increase in speed to visualization, along with a host of capabilities that will give them one place, at the user level, to perform simple and complex functions and transformations on their data. For example, by chaining a simple set of point-and-click transformations, users will be able join, filter, re-name, and calculate to get the results they need. Grafana is becoming an ideal tool to speed and ease data transformations and reduce the need to perform disjointed transformations through a variety of query languages outside the dashboard.” — Torkel Ödegaard, creator of Grafana and co-founder and CGO of Grafana Labs

“We believe vendors shouldn’t own observability strategies; users and organizations do. We are focused on helping them in their journey through an open and composable framework that can unite an organization’s complex environments. With Grafana, they can bring together their own custom APIs, open source metrics like Prometheus or Graphite along with Loki and Elasticsearch for logs, and proprietary systems like Datadog, Splunk, NewRelic, Oracle, and ServiceNow.” — Raj Dutt, co-founder and CEO of Grafana Labs.

Grafana 7.0 is available immediately for Grafana Cloud customers.