Grafana 8.0: Unified Observability Platform
K8s Guru
2 min read
Table of Contents
Introduction
Grafana 8.0 — Unified Observability Platform — was released on June 8, 2021.
In Kubernetes, the hard part isn’t collecting data — it’s turning traces, metrics, and logs into something you can act on quickly.
In this release: Grafana 8.0 introduces unified alerting, real-time streaming, enhanced visualization, and better Kubernetes integration for comprehensive observability.
Unified Alerting
- Alerting engine consolidation provides a single, consistent alerting system across all data sources.
- Alert rules can query multiple data sources (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo) in a single rule.
- Notification channels support Slack, PagerDuty, email, and custom webhooks.
- Alert grouping and silencing simplify managing large numbers of alerts.
Real-Time Streaming
- Live updates enable dashboards to update in real-time without manual refresh.
- Streaming data sources support high-frequency metrics and logs.
- Performance improvements reduce latency for real-time monitoring scenarios.
- WebSocket support enables efficient bidirectional communication.
Enhanced Visualization
- New panel types expand visualization options for different data types.
- Time series improvements provide better handling of high-cardinality metrics.
- Geomap panel enables geographic visualization of metrics and events.
- 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.
Operational Features
- Performance optimizations reduce dashboard load times and improve responsiveness.
- Security enhancements provide better authentication and authorization.
- Multi-tenancy improvements enable better isolation between teams and projects.
- Documentation expansion includes comprehensive guides for common scenarios.
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 | June 8, 2021 |
| Headline Features | Unified alerting, real-time streaming, enhanced visualization, better Kubernetes integration |
| Why it Matters | Provides a comprehensive observability platform with unified alerting and real-time capabilities |
Grafana 8.0 continues to evolve as the leading observability platform, providing teams with powerful tools for monitoring and alerting on Kubernetes workloads.