Grafana 10.0: What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in Grafana 10.0

How does Grafana 10 improve cross-data-source navigation and organization?

Grafana 10 introduces Correlations, a preview feature that lets you link fields between any two data sources directly from Explore.

• Enable the feature with the correlations toggle.
• Define relationships once; then a single click runs the related query in the target source.
• Works alongside the existing data-links mechanism, extending it to arbitrary source pairs.

In practice, this means you can jump from a Prometheus metric to a related log entry in Loki without leaving the UI, dramatically reducing context-switching time.

Subfolders, also in preview, let you nest dashboards and alerts inside hierarchical folders. Enable with the nestedFolders toggle, then create, read, update, and delete subfolders via the UI or API. RBAC inheritance simplifies permission management across teams.

What are the major new dashboard and visualization capabilities in Grafana 10?

Grafana 10 adds several first-class panels and workflow enhancements that expand what you can build inside a dashboard.

• Canvas panel is now GA, offering free-form layout, connection drawing, and data-driven styling.
• Trend panel (experimental) plots numeric X-axes for function curves, torque-speed maps, and supply-demand relationships.
• Datagrid panel (experimental) provides a spreadsheet-like editor; you can add, delete, freeze columns, and even use the grid as a data source for other panels.
• Drag-and-drop CSV/Excel lets you drop files into the query editor; the data is stored in the dashboard JSON (max 1 MB).
• Improved datasource picker surfaces recent sources, labels, and descriptions, speeding up the "empty-state" workflow.
• Time series panels now support configurable time-region overlays for work-hour shading or weekend highlighting.
• Annotation filtering and a redesigned log-context UI give finer control over what appears where.

These additions let you replace external BI tools with native Grafana experiences, especially when combined with the new Mixed datasource support in Explore.

Which security and authentication enhancements should I be aware of in Grafana 10?

Grafana 10 streamlines SAML configuration and hardens the browser surface.

• The SAML UI lets admins configure SAML providers without restarting Grafana and protects the UI with RBAC.
• Usernames and email addresses are now case-insensitive, eliminating login errors caused by capitalization.
• Trusted Types (experimental) can be enabled via CSP settings to mitigate XSS risks from third-party plugins.
• Private Data Source Connect (preview, Cloud Pro/Advanced) uses SOCKS-over-SSH to securely bridge on-prem or VPC data sources to Grafana Cloud without exposing IP ranges.

Most teams will enable the SAML UI and case-insensitivity immediately; Trusted Types and PDC are optional but recommended for high-security environments.

How have alerting, tracing, and data source integrations evolved in Grafana 10?

Alerting, tracing, and data source plugins received functional upgrades that improve observability pipelines.

• Alerting now includes a State history view and preview of notification templates, helping you validate alerts before deployment.
• Span filtering adds service, name, duration, and tag filters to the trace view, reducing visual clutter in large traces.
• OpenTelemetry replaces OpenTracing under the hood, preserving compatibility while aligning with the industry standard.
• Azure Monitor adds a "Traces" query type for Application Insights, enabling trace visualizations alongside metrics.
• Prometheus delta queries cache incremental results, cutting network load for now-relative dashboards.
• Phlare is renamed to Grafana Pyroscope, supporting both backends transparently.
• The new Data plane contract defines typed dataframes for plugins, improving interoperability across the platform.

These changes let you build tighter end-to-end monitoring stacks without custom glue code.