Grafana 12.3: What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in Grafana 12.3

Grafana 12.3 focuses on three core themes: making log exploration faster and more powerful with a rebuilt logs panel, consolidating dashboard time controls to reduce the need for panel duplication, and expanding the data source ecosystem with new integrations and query capabilities. There is also a critical security fix for CVE-2025-41115 bundled in this release -- review the security advisory before upgrading in regulated environments.

What changed in the Grafana logs panel in version 12.3?

The logs visualization panel was completely rebuilt from scratch in Grafana 12.3, delivering meaningful performance and usability gains for anyone doing log-driven root cause analysis at scale. The redesign is generally available across all Grafana editions.

In practice, the biggest day-to-day wins are color highlighting (now configurable per log field or level), client-side string search and level filtering, and a larger default font with the option to switch back to compact display. Timestamps now show millisecond precision by default, with nanosecond precision available as an option -- relevant if you are debugging race conditions or high-frequency event streams.

The log details view was also redesigned. It can now appear either inline below the selected log line or as a resizable sidebar, which is particularly useful on wide monitors where you want to keep your main log stream in view while digging into a specific entry. The log line menu moved to a dropdown on the left-hand side of each line, replacing the previous inline icon cluster.

Also experimental in this release: a rebuilt logs context component that lets you view surrounding events before and after any log line. The time window is now adjustable from approximately 100 milliseconds up to two hours -- a significant improvement over the fixed window in previous versions.

The new field selector component (GA) complements these changes. Modeled after the field selector in the table visualization, it lists all fields present in the displayed log set in alphabetical order, shows the percentage of log lines containing each field, and lets you toggle and reorder fields on the fly. Watch out for dashboards with heavily customized log panels -- some display configuration from the old panel may not carry over automatically after upgrade.

-- Example: Enabling the new logs panel feature toggles in grafana.ini
[feature_toggles]
enable = newLogsPanel logsContextRedesign

How does the new panel time settings drawer improve dashboard workflows in Grafana 12.3?

The new panel time settings drawer consolidates all time overrides into a single, accessible control surface available directly from the panel menu -- no more entering full edit mode just to adjust a time shift or override. This is available in public preview across all Grafana editions.

The drawer exposes four controls:

• Panel time range -- Override the dashboard-level time range for an individual panel.
• Time shift -- Apply an offset relative to either the dashboard time range or the panel-specific time range you have already set.
• Time comparison -- Display two time ranges side by side in a single panel for comparative analysis (for example, week-over-week or month-over-month).
• Hide panel time range -- Suppress the time range label in the panel header for cleaner public-facing dashboards.

The time comparison control is the most impactful addition here. Before 12.3, comparing two time windows typically meant duplicating panels or entire dashboards. Now the comparison is driven from the panel itself. Most teams building performance benchmarking or SLO trend dashboards will be able to retire a significant number of duplicate panels after adopting this feature.

This matters if you manage dashboards with many repeated panels that exist purely to show different time offsets of the same query -- those can likely be collapsed into single panels using the new drawer, simplifying JSON complexity and provisioning maintenance.

-- Access via:
Panel menu > Time settings

-- Feature is in public preview; no feature toggle required.
-- JSON schema field: panel.timeSettings (check upgrade guide for schema details)

What new data sources and query capabilities were added in Grafana 12.3?

Grafana 12.3 extends the data source ecosystem in several practical directions, from new integrations to deeper query capabilities in existing connectors.

SolarWinds Enterprise (public preview, Cloud and Enterprise only) -- A new native data source for SolarWinds network and infrastructure monitoring. You can now pull CPU load, memory usage, and active alert data directly into Grafana dashboards, enabling correlation with application-level data from other sources in the same panel row. Teams running hybrid or multi-cloud environments with SolarWinds as the infrastructure layer will find this useful for unified incident response views.

Amazon CloudWatch -- log anomaly detection and log patterns (GA, all editions) -- Two new CloudWatch query capabilities land in GA. Log anomaly detection uses AWS-native ML to establish baselines and surface deviations directly in Grafana without leaving the platform. Log patterns let you group log entries by recurring structure using the patterns command, and the diff command compares pattern frequency between time periods. Both commands are now supported in the CloudWatch Logs Insights language editor with full syntax highlighting.

Databricks Unity Catalog support (GA, Cloud and Enterprise) -- The Databricks Enterprise data source now respects Unity Catalog permissions and lineage metadata. This means teams with centralized governance policies no longer need to create separate access paths for Grafana -- queries run with the same fine-grained access controls defined in Databricks, ensuring compliance standards follow the data into dashboards.

Honeycomb raw query support (public preview, Cloud and Enterprise) -- The Honeycomb Enterprise data source gains full API access through raw queries, including complex filters, aggregations, breakdowns, and array-based IN / NOT IN filters. Variable substitution is handled automatically. To enable on-premises, set the honeycombEnableRawQuery feature flag.

OpenSearch PPL editor enhancements (GA, all editions) -- The Piped Processing Language editor in the OpenSearch data source now supports syntax highlighting, keyword and command auto-suggestions, and index field suggestions. This removes the main friction point for teams adopting PPL after migrating from Elasticsearch.

What dashboard and visualization quality-of-life improvements shipped in Grafana 12.3?

Beyond the headline log and time-control features, Grafana 12.3 ships several targeted dashboard improvements that reduce friction in daily operations and sharing workflows.

Export dashboard as PNG image (GA, all editions) -- You can now export any dashboard as a PNG directly from the Grafana UI using Export as image. The workflow generates a preview before download, making it straightforward to embed dashboard snapshots in incident postmortems, Slack messages, or slide decks. This replaces browser-level screenshot workflows that often produced inconsistent results across different screen sizes or themes.

Switch template variable type (GA, all editions) -- A new variable type renders as a toggle switch in the dashboard header rather than a dropdown. It is designed for boolean-style pairs: true/false, 1/0, yes/no, or any two custom values. In practice this is ideal for debug mode toggles, A/B filter states, or any conditional query parameter that should be one of two mutually exclusive values. Adding a Switch variable follows the same path as other variable types: dashboard settings > Variables > New variable, then select the Switch type.

CSS styling for table cells (GA, all editions) -- Table cells can now be styled using CSS properties through the Styling from field cell option, accepting a JSON object with standard CSS keys. This gives dashboard authors direct control over color, font weight, borders, and background without relying on value mappings or thresholds alone.

-- Example CSS styling object for a table cell:
{
  "color": "white",
  "background": "#d44000",
  "fontWeight": "bold",
  "borderRadius": "4px"
}

Interactive Learning (public preview, all editions) -- A new in-product help system accessible through the help icon provides context-aware tutorials, videos, and documentation links based on where you are in the Grafana UI. This is aimed at reducing onboarding time and context-switching to external docs. Enable it with the interactiveLearning feature toggle.