We’re thrilled to announce the public preview of Grafana 11 and several feature enhancements in Azure Managed Grafana based on your feedback. We continue to evolve our service to deliver what matters most to our customers.
Grafana 11
This annual major update to Grafana includes new functionality and improvements across dashboards, panels, queries, and alerts. The current preview in Managed Grafana offers Grafana v11.2. It includes the following key features:
- Explore Metrics
- Scenes powered dashboards
- Subfolders
- Numerous improvements to canvas visualization and alerting
For more information on Grafana 11, please refer What’s new in Grafana v11.0, v11.1, and v11.2 and consider how the breaking changes may impact your specific use cases.
You’ll need to create a new Managed Grafana instance to use Grafana 11 preview. Upgrading from Grafana 10 directly isn’t supported yet. You can copy over dashboards from your current Managed Grafana instance by following the steps in Migrate to Azure Managed Grafana. Please note that not all Grafana 11 features are available in Managed Grafana at present; if applicable, more features will be added over time.
Azure Monitor Updates for Grafana 11
Improved Azure Monitor Logs visualizations
This update extends Azure Monitor logs visualizations to support Basic Logs. This enables you to view Azure Monitor Log tables that have been configured with the lower cost Basic Log tier in Explore and dashboard panels.
Additionally, Azure Monitor Logs details can now be viewed in Grafana Explore and Logs panels. You can filter query results by column values, run ad-hoc statistics and choose which column to display using simple point and click interaction without needing to modify the query text. Explore views also include options to view JSON data in dynamic columns. Azure Kubernetes Service users can leverage these views in a new Container Log dashboard.
Prometheus Exemplars support for Azure Monitor Application Insight traces
You can now drill down from Prometheus exemplars to Application Insights traces in Grafana. Using Exemplars in your troubleshooting workflow improves triage and analysis response times by allowing you to navigate from metrics to sample traces related to errors and exceptions and easily compare performance of transactions. To take advantage of this capability, the application needs to be instrumented to emit Prometheus metrics with Exemplars and traces to Azure Monitor Application Insights.
Sign up for the Private Preview of Exemplars support in your Azure Monitor Workspace.
User-Assigned Managed Identity
Since its inception, Managed Grafana sets up a system-assigned managed identity for a new Grafana workspace by default. You can use this managed identity as the security principal to access backend data sources connected to your workspace. While it’s convenient to use, system-assigned managed identity isn’t always suitable. Enterprise customers who have stricter identity management policies typically create and manage all Entra ID identities by themselves. Managed Grafana now allows these customers to use identities defined in their Entra ID tenants instead. With the user-assigned managed identity feature, you can select an existing Entra ID identity to be used for authentication and authorization with your data sources.
Please note that you can choose only one type of managed identity for each workspace. You can’t enable both system-assigned and user-assigned managed identities simultaneously.
Grafana Settings
Grafana server settings allow you to customize specific server behaviors. Managed Grafana configures and manages these settings automatically, so you don’t have to deal with them. There are some settings where usage varies from user to user. Managed Grafana now gives you the option to change their default values. The currently supported ones are:
- viewers_can_edit – determines whether users with the Grafana Viewer role can edit dashboards
- external_enabled – controls the public sharing of snapshots
Grafana Migration Tool
If you have a self-hosted Grafana server on-premises or in the cloud that you’d like to migrate to Managed Grafana, you can perform this operation with one command in the Azure CLI. The new az grafana migrate command automates the process of copying your existing dashboards from any Grafana server to your Managed Grafana workspace. It supports several options that control how the content migration should be conducted as well as a dry-run option for you to test and see the migration results before committing to the operation.
Let Us Know How We’re Doing
If you’re a current user of Managed Grafana, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment and fill out this online survey. It will help us further improve our service to better serve you. Thank you!
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