Grafana 10.0: Next-Generation Observability Platform

Introduction

Grafana 10.0, released on July 25, 2023, is most relevant if your on-call needs clearer signals and faster root cause loops. You typically feel the difference during incidents: faster queries, better signal-to-noise in alerts, and more actionable context when tracing issues across services.

Unified Alerting Maturity

• Alerting improvements provide unified experience across data sources with consistent rule management.
• Notification channels enhancements enable better integration with Slack, PagerDuty, and other systems.
• Alert grouping and routing improvements provide smarter alert management and reduced noise.
• Templating enhancements enable dynamic alert messages with rich context.

New Visualization Features

1. Advanced charts provide new visualization types for time-series, distributions, and correlation analysis.
2. Canvas improvements enable custom dashboards with drag-and-drop functionality.
3. Geomap enhancements provide better geographic data visualization with custom layers.
4. Heatmaps improvements deliver better performance and interactivity for large datasets.

Enhanced Kubernetes Integration

• Kubernetes plugin improvements provide better visualization of workloads, services, and ingress resources.
• Multi-cluster support enables viewing and managing resources across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
• Resource health indicators provide real-time status of pods, deployments, and services.
• Cost insights integration shows resource usage and cost allocation per service.

Performance & Scalability

• Query performance optimizations reduce latency for complex queries across multiple data sources.
• Dashboard loading improvements accelerate rendering for dashboards with many panels.
• Caching enhancements reduce load on backend data sources with intelligent cache management.
• Resource usage optimizations enable better performance in resource-constrained environments.

Developer Experience

• Plugin development improvements simplify creating custom plugins with better SDKs and documentation.
• API enhancements provide more flexible programmatic access to Grafana resources.
• Terraform provider improvements enable infrastructure-as-code for Grafana configuration.
• GitOps integration allows dashboard and alert configuration in version control.

Getting Started

helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm install grafana grafana/grafana --version 10.0.0 \
  --set adminPassword=admin \
  --set service.type=LoadBalancer

Access Grafana:

kubectl port-forward svc/grafana 3000:80

Configure Kubernetes data source:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: grafana-datasources
data:
  datasources.yaml: |
    apiVersion: 1
    datasources:
    - name: Kubernetes
      type: kubernetes
      access: proxy
      url: http://kubernetes.default

Summary

Grafana 10.0 establishes a new standard for observability platforms, providing teams with powerful tools for monitoring, visualization, and alerting across their entire infrastructure.