Grafana 13.2: What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in Grafana v13.2

How does Workload Identity Federation change BigQuery and GCM authentication in Grafana 13.2?

Workload Identity Federation (WIF) lets Grafana Cloud connect to BigQuery and Google Cloud Monitoring without storing a long-lived service account key file. Instead, Grafana Cloud exchanges the signed-in user's OIDC token for a short-lived Google Cloud access token through the Security Token Service.

In practice, this removes one of the more persistent security liabilities in cloud data source setup: keys copied into config files, shared across teams, or forgotten until they leak. Credentials issued through WIF are scoped to the active session and expire automatically, so there is nothing to rotate or revoke manually.

This matters if your organization has a policy against long-lived service account keys, or if you have struggled to track down who has copies of an existing key file. Teams on Grafana Cloud using BigQuery or GCM should evaluate switching existing data sources over to WIF during their next maintenance window.

What's new with saved queries in Grafana 13.2?

Saved queries reach general availability in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud in this release, turning ad hoc query knowledge into something the whole team can reuse. You can find saved queries from anywhere using the command palette (cmd/ctrl+K) and jump straight into Explore.

Two additions round out the workflow:

• Command palette discovery, so queries surface alongside dashboards and other resources instead of living in a separate menu
• Terraform provisioning, so saved queries can be defined and managed as code alongside the rest of your Grafana configuration

Most teams onboarding new members will get the most immediate value here: instead of re-deriving a working query from scratch, new hires can search the command palette for an existing, trusted one.

How has dashboard editing changed in Grafana 13.2?

Dashboard editing gets several usability upgrades in 13.2 aimed at reducing friction during day-to-day dashboard work. The query variable editor has been redesigned with a wider dialog box, a values preview at the top, and a tabbed layout below, cutting down on scrolling while you tune variable settings.

Other editing improvements include:

• Multi-select grouping, letting you select several panels at once and group them into a row or tab instead of moving panels one by one
• A View panel sidebar (public preview) that lets viewers without edit permissions adjust visualization options and split a crowded time series into one graph per series or label
• Clearer auto layout indication, so it is obvious why dragging a panel's corner has no effect when auto layout is managing panel sizes
• Cross-filter support extended to Histogram, State timeline, and Status History panels, in addition to bar chart, table, and time series

Watch out for the View panel sidebar and panel thresholds variable interpolation: both are marked experimental or public preview, so behavior may still change before general availability.

What data source improvements does Grafana 13.2 include?

Grafana 13.2 ships targeted improvements for three commonly used data sources. OpenSearch gets an index browser in both configuration and query editing, so you can search available indices by substring, wildcard, or regex instead of typing index names from memory, with document count and cluster health shown alongside each result.

Oracle connections are simpler with Easy Connect Plus support: a single string like host:port/service replaces the need to wrangle a tnsnames.ora file, and the port defaults to 1521 if omitted.

Azure Monitor now supports the Metrics Batch API, grouping eligible metric queries into fewer calls to Azure. This matters if your dashboards query many Azure resources at once, since it reduces both query latency and the chance of throttling.

What Git Sync enhancements are in Grafana 13.2?

Git Sync in 13.2 adds support for GitHub Enterprise, covering both Server and Cloud versions, so dashboards and folders provisioned as JSON files can now sync with an enterprise GitHub instance the same way they do with github.com.

Two related additions improve traceability and platform coverage:

• Commit authoring: if commit signing is not enabled, you can set an author override, or Grafana will default to using the signed-in user's name and email as the commit author
• Webhooks are now available for GitLab and BitBucket, in addition to GitHub, enabling real-time updates and pull request integrations across more providers

Most teams already using Git Sync for version-controlled dashboards will want to enable commit authoring first, since it directly improves audit trails in shared repositories.