Grafana 7.0 Delivers Major Visualization Upgrades and Makes Significant Progress in Uniting & Transforming Data from All Sources ranging from Metrics and Logs to Traces and Beyond

Today, Grafana Labs is announcing the general availability of Grafana 7.0 with significant enhancements to simplify the development of custom plugins and drastically increase the power, speed and flexibility of visualization. The latest release helps organizations realize their monitoring, visualization and observability goals even faster. Open source Grafana is among the world’s most popular dashboard solutions and boasts more than 500,000 active installations and millions of dashboards in use across the globe. 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/starter dashboards supporting users’ needs both on-premise and in the cloud.

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

(Easier to) Connect and Unify All Your Data
- New plugins as a result of partnerships across Google (Stackdriver/Cloud Monitor), Microsoft (Azure Monitor), and Amazon (Cloudwatch), plus 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 popular open source projects like Prometheus, Graphite and Elasticsearch to proprietary sources such as Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, Zabbix, Oracle, ServiceNow and including your 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 provides consistent data structure and significantly reduces the effort required to develop plugins.

(Much more power and control to) Process and Transform Your Data
- 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.
- Transformations include renaming, summarizing, combining, and performing calculations from different panels, putting time series labels into columns, reusing and refining query results across other panels, and more.
- New data inspection feature lets users see, export (CSV), and perform simple transformations on the underlying source data for a panel. They can also 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.

“I can’t wait to get this in the hands of our users. 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 essential 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 for uniting an organization’s complex environments that can range from their own custom APIs and open source metrics like Prometheus or Graphite and Loki for logs, to merging open source and proprietary systems like Elasticsearch, Datadog, Splunk, Oracle, and ServiceNow.” — Raj Dutt, co-founder and CEO of Grafana Labs.

Grafana 7.0 is available immediately for Grafana Cloud customers or through a free 30-day cloud trial and for download.