Grafana 13.1: What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in Grafana v13.1

How does Git Sync improve dashboard deployment for regulated environments?

Git Sync in v13.1 directly addresses compliance and auditing requirements with verified commit signing. Configure your repository signing key once, and every commit Git Sync makes gets cryptographically signed with GPG, SSH, or S/MIME keys -- Git providers immediately mark these as Verified, creating an auditable trail for branch protection policies and compliance reviews. In practice, this means teams with strict change control requirements can now enforce signed commits on their main branch while dashboards sync seamlessly in the background.

The new root-level sync capability streamlines deployments across hybrid environments. Previously, all Git Sync dashboards landed in a designated folder; now you can pick Sync at root level without a containing folder in setup and provisioned dashboards integrate directly alongside manually authored content. This matters if you're managing both central observability templates and team-specific dashboards in one instance.

Dashboard import from the Git Sync UI closes the loop for teams building dashboards ad-hoc. Hit Import from a provisioned folder, select your JSON file, pick the branch and commit message, and Grafana routes you through a streamlined workflow -- the dashboard lands in your repo as a committed, tracked asset. Documentation is built in: add README.md next to your dashboards in Git and it renders inline below the folder's dashboard list, keeping runbooks and ownership notes visible where they're needed.

What dashboard authoring shortcuts ship in v13.1?

Grafana v13.1 dramatically cuts setup time for interactive dashboards. The Filter and Group by control is now GA, letting you add filtering and grouping to any dashboard without configuring template variables. Users can apply default filters, review recent filter history, and drill down from panels -- all while keeping the dashboard clean and navigable. Watch out for this if you have heavy custom variable setups: quick filters may duplicate filtering logic you already have, so evaluate whether some of your template variables can retire.

Panel styling gets a copy-paste feature. Select a panel, copy its display options and field styling, and paste onto another panel of the same type. Colors, thresholds, sparklines, and overrides all transfer in one action -- no manual reconfiguration. Section-level variables (now GA) add precision scoping: scope a variable to a single row or tab instead of dashboard-wide, preventing variable changes from rippling across unrelated services.

The revamped query editor (public preview) introduces multi-select with bulk actions and a stacked view for managing complex panels faster. If you maintain panels with many queries, this will accelerate iteration. Time series to table transformation (GA) converts time series into compact table rows with trend sparklines -- perfect for building at-a-glance overviews of many series in dense dashboards. Nested table improvements let you apply field overrides inside sub-tables, adding flexibility to hierarchical data layouts.

Can Grafana Assistant now query my data sources directly?

Grafana Assistant, now pre-installed in Enterprise, can query eight more data sources in v13.1: Snowflake, Jira, Dynatrace, and five others. Instead of manually bouncing between Grafana and external tools, ask Assistant a question about performance, incidents, or tickets, and it retrieves answers from your databases and observability stack in one place. This is especially powerful for incident response -- "What was our error rate spike correlated with?" can now pull context from traces, logs, metrics, and ticketing systems without context switching.

For Enterprise deployments, just connect your Grafana Cloud account and Assistant is ready; no plugin installation required. Most teams will see faster onboarding and fewer silos between observability data and incident context.

Which data sources now support secure private connections?

Private Data Source Connect (PDC) expands in v13.1 to cover MQTT, GitHub, and IBM Db2, joining other datasources already supported. PDC creates a private, encrypted tunnel between your Grafana Cloud stack and data sources running inside private networks, VPCs, or on-premises -- no public endpoint required. If you're integrating legacy databases or IoT systems that can't expose themselves to the internet, PDC eliminates that barrier without sacrificing security.