Grafana 8: What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in Grafana 8

How does Grafana 8 improve alerting and monitoring?

Grafana 8 introduces a unified alerting system that centralizes Grafana-managed, Mimir, Loki and Prometheus alerts in a single UI and API.

• Create, edit, and view alerts across all supported back-ends from one place.
• New Alertmanager datasource (alpha) provides native Prometheus Alertmanager integration when alpha plugins are enabled.
• Legacy alerts remain functional but are marked for future removal.

What are the new panel capabilities and library panels in Grafana 8?

Grafana 8 adds library panels for reusable visualizations and a redesigned panel editor with searchable options and revamped value mappings.

• Library panels let you edit a panel once and propagate changes to every dashboard that uses it.
• Panel editor now shows all options in a single pane and includes a search box.
• Value mappings have been completely redesigned for easier configuration.
• New stable visualizations: Time series (default) and Pie chart.
• Beta visualizations: Bar chart, State timeline, Status history, Histogram.

How does Grafana 8 enable real-time data streaming?

Grafana Live now supports websocket-based streaming from data sources and a generic push endpoint.

• Data sources such as MQTT can push updates over a websocket to any connected dashboard.
• The new /api/live/push endpoint accepts POSTed metrics and broadcasts them to all dashboards listening on that stream.
• Real-time updates are reflected instantly in panels without a page reload.

curl -X POST http://grafana.example.com/api/live/push \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"message":"cpu_usage","value":42}'

Which data sources and authentication methods received major updates in Grafana 8?

Grafana 8 brings extensive enhancements to Azure Monitor, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Graphite, Jaeger, and adds JWT authentication.

• Azure Monitor: Azure Resource Graph support, Managed Identity, and expanded Log Analytics queries.
• Elasticsearch: semver version strings, full template variable support, custom log line limits, and automatic type guessing.
• Google Cloud Monitoring: automatic preprocessing selection for new queries.
• Graphite: variable metric expansion via the expand API and automatic mapping to Loki queries.
• Jaeger: additional trace-finding parameters.
• Authentication: JWT tokens can be accepted via HTTP header; OAuth now supports empty scopes and strict role attribute parsing.

What performance and UI changes should production teams expect in Grafana 8?

Grafana 8 delivers a faster, more accessible UI and significant performance gains.

• Initial download size reduced by roughly 40%, improving load times on slow networks.
• uPlot replaces Flot for Time series, Stat, Timeline, Histogram, and Bar chart panels, rendering 2-3× faster.
• Streaming, zooming, tooltips, and synchronized cursors are noticeably snappier.
• New theme architecture provides a refreshed look, better accessibility, and a redesigned home dashboard.