Grafana 7: What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in Grafana 7

How does the new panel editor improve dashboard building?

The new panel editor separates display settings into a collapsible right-hand pane and introduces a unified data-option model.

• Consistent UI for units, thresholds, links, decimals, and value mappings across every panel type.
• Overrides can be defined once and will apply when you switch from Graph to Table, Stat, etc.
• Panel-level options are now data-driven, making them overridable via field overrides or plugin-specific rules.

In practice this means you can set a temperature unit on a Graph panel, change the visualization to a Gauge, and the unit stays intact.

What are transformations and how can they be used for data manipulation?

Transformations let you reshape, join, and calculate on query results without leaving Grafana.

• Reduce - collapse rows to a single value (max, min, mean, last).
• Filter by name - include or exclude fields using regex.
• Outer join - combine multiple time-series or tables on a common field.
• Add field from calculation - perform arithmetic between fields or queries.

Example: to subtract one series from another you can add a transformation "Add field from calculation" with the expression fieldA - fieldB. The result appears as a new column that can be visualized directly.

You can also reuse a query result from another panel by selecting --dashboard-- as the data source and picking the source panel, which saves load time on heavy SQL or log queries.

How does Grafana 7 enhance tracing, logs, and metrics correlation?

Grafana 7 adds a dedicated tracing UI in Explore and native support for Jaeger and Zipkin.

• Search for a trace ID directly in Explore or let Loki auto-detect trace IDs in log lines and link to the trace view.
• CloudWatch Logs now offers autocomplete, deep linking to the Logs Insights console, and alerting on time-series results from stats queries.
• Query history is out of beta, letting you star, comment, and reuse frequent queries across metrics, logs, and traces.

This matters if your team needs a single pane of glass to jump from a metric spike to the underlying logs and the exact trace that caused it.

What changes affect plugin development and backend extensions?

The plugins platform has been rebuilt with a modern React component library and a CLI toolkit.

• Use @grafana/ui, @grafana/data, and @grafana/runtime packages from NPM for front-end plugins.
• The @grafana/toolkit CLI scaffolds, builds, and tests plugins without manual webpack configuration.
• Backend plugins are now officially supported via the Grafana Plugin SDK for Go, enabling alerting and custom resource endpoints.
• Metrics and health checks are built-in for plugins, and the old unofficial backend-plugin API is deprecated.

Watch out for the removal of PhantomJS - image rendering now requires the Grafana Image Renderer plugin, which runs on headless Chromium.