Announcing Grafana 13 Support in Azure Managed Grafana

nuzhat-minhaz

Microsoft

Aug 07, 2026

Bringing enhanced dashboarding experiences, Git-based dashboard lifecycle management, and a seamless upgrade path for Azure-authenticated Prometheus customers.

Enhanced Dashboarding and Visualization Experience

Grafana 13 introduces a number of improvements that make dashboards easier to build, reuse, and manage at scale. Teams can create richer observability experiences while reducing duplication and improving consistency across environments. These improvements include Dynamic Dashboards, Saved Queries, enhanced filtering and grouping experiences, dashboard templates, and additional usability enhancements that streamline dashboard authoring and discovery. From enhanced dashboard authoring experiences and reusable queries to Git-based dashboard lifecycle management, Grafana 13 helps teams build and operate observability solutions more efficiently at scale.

Git Sync: Manage Dashboards as Code

One of the most anticipated capabilities associated with Grafana 13 is Git Sync: enabling organizations to manage Grafana dashboards using Git-based workflows. Dashboards can be stored as JSON files in a Git repository, making it easier to version, review, and automate dashboard changes using existing engineering practices.

With Git Sync, teams can:

Track dashboard changes through source control.
Review updates through pull requests.
Integrate dashboard deployments into CI/CD pipelines.
Collaborate on dashboard development using familiar Git workflows.

Git Sync supports bidirectional synchronization. Changes made in Grafana can be committed back to a repository, while changes committed to the repository are automatically synchronized to Grafana.

Configuration is managed directly from the Grafana UI, with authentication supported through either a GitHub App or a Personal Access Token. For customers managing large observability estates, Git Sync helps bring dashboards into existing infrastructure-as-code and platform engineering workflows. Visit MSLearn to check out Git Sync on Azure Managed Grafana.

Prometheus Authentication Changes in Grafana 13

One of the most important changes in Grafana 13: using Prometheus with Azure authentication. Starting with Grafana 13, Azure authentication is no longer supported in the standard open-source Prometheus data source. Instead, Azure authentication is exclusively available through the Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus plugin. This change aligns with Grafana Labs' updated Prometheus data source strategy and deprecation guidance.

Customers do not need to modify existing dashboards as part of this transition. Dashboards remain compatible across both plugin versions, and existing visualizations, imports, exports, and dashboard definitions continue to work as expected. Connectivity and query execution against Azure Monitor Workspaces and Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus endpoints will use the Azure-specific plugin that now owns Azure authentication support.

Prometheus data sources configured with non-Azure authentication methods are unaffected by this change and continue to operate without modification.

We Recommend:

You can start using Grafana 13 today by creating a new Azure Managed Grafana workspace and selecting Grafana 13. We encourage customers to explore the new dashboarding experiences introduced in Grafana 13 and review their Prometheus configurations to understand how Azure-authenticated data sources are transitioned to the Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus plugin.

Existing dashboards continue to work without changes. Customers do not need to: