Grafana 7.0: Unified Observability Platform
K8s Guru
2 min read
Table of Contents
Introduction
Most Kubernetes teams don’t fail to collect telemetry — they fail to make it usable. Dashboards drift, queries get copy‑pasted, and each new data source adds yet another mental model for on-call engineers to remember at 3 a.m.
Grafana 7.0, released on May 20, 2020, pushed in the opposite direction: a unified data model, a more flexible plugin foundation, better visualizations, and tighter Kubernetes workflows. The goal is simple — reduce friction between what you measure and what you can reliably act on.
Why this matters for Kubernetes teams
- Unify the experience across signals: when metrics, logs, and traces live behind a consistent UI, incident response gets faster.
- Make dashboards part of the platform: provisioning and RBAC features support “dashboards as code” without turning Grafana into a snowflake.
- Scale without losing meaning: improvements around transformations and time series handling help when query volume and cardinality climb.
Unified Data Model
- Consistent query experience provides a unified interface for querying different data sources.
- Data transformations enable powerful data manipulation and aggregation across sources.
- Field mapping simplifies working with different metric and log formats.
- Plugin architecture improvements enable easier development and integration of custom plugins.
Enhanced Visualization
- New panel types expand visualization options for different data types and use cases.
- Panel editor improvements provide better user experience for creating and editing dashboards.
- Tracing support enables visualization of distributed traces from Jaeger, Zipkin, and Tempo.
- Time series improvements provide better handling of high-cardinality metrics.
- Canvas panel provides flexible, custom visualizations for complex use cases.
Kubernetes Integration
- Service discovery improvements automatically discover Kubernetes services and pods.
- RBAC integration enables fine-grained access control based on Kubernetes permissions.
- Dashboard provisioning simplifies managing dashboards as Kubernetes ConfigMaps.
- Plugin ecosystem expansion includes more Kubernetes-specific plugins.
Getting Started
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm install grafana grafana/grafana
Access Grafana:
kubectl port-forward svc/grafana 3000:80
Summary
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 20, 2020 |
| Headline Features | Unified data model, new plugin architecture, enhanced visualization, better Kubernetes integration |
| Why it Matters | Provides a comprehensive observability platform with unified querying and visualization |
Grafana 7.0 continues to evolve as the leading observability platform, providing teams with powerful tools for monitoring and visualizing Kubernetes workloads.