Grafana 11.1: Enhanced Observability and Platform Improvements

Introduction

Grafana is often the “single pane of glass” teams actually look at during an incident. When dashboards are slow, queries are awkward, or alerts are hard to manage, the platform stops helping and starts getting in the way.

Grafana 11.1, released on November 5, 2025, focuses on the fundamentals that improve day-to-day ops: better dashboard UX and performance, tighter data source integrations across metrics/logs/traces, and more capable alerting workflows.

Why this matters in practice

• Faster dashboards: performance improvements reduce time-to-signal when you’re under pressure.
• Better correlation: improved integrations make it easier to pivot between metrics, logs, and traces.
• Alert hygiene: stronger grouping/silencing reduces “alert fatigue” without hiding real problems.

Dashboard Enhancements

• Improved visualization options provide more chart types and customization capabilities.
• Dashboard sharing improvements enable better collaboration and dashboard distribution.
• Performance optimizations reduce load times for complex dashboards with many panels.
• Templating enhancements provide more flexible variable substitution and query options.

Data Source Integration

1. Prometheus integration improvements provide better query editor and performance.
2. Loki enhancements enable better log exploration and correlation with metrics.
3. Tempo integration improvements provide better distributed tracing visualization.
4. Cloud provider integrations expand support for AWS, Azure, and GCP monitoring.

Alerting Improvements

• Alert rules enhancements provide more sophisticated alert conditions and evaluation.
• Notification channels expand support for more notification backends and templates.
• Alert grouping improvements enable better organization and management of alerts.
• Silencing capabilities provide better control over alert suppression and scheduling.

Performance & Scalability

• Query performance improvements reduce latency for dashboard queries.
• Caching enhancements improve response times for frequently accessed data.
• Resource usage optimizations reduce memory and CPU consumption.
• Scaling improvements enable better handling of large deployments with many users.

Getting Started

# Install Grafana using Helm
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm install grafana grafana/grafana --version 11.1.0

Summary

Grafana 11.1 continues to provide the leading platform for unified observability, making it easier than ever to monitor and understand Kubernetes infrastructure and applications.