Grafana 12.1 launches public preview for monitoring tool Grafana Advisor

The software company Grafana Labs has released Grafana 12.1. The open source platform for data visualization comes with several new features: There are additional options for notifications as well as visualizations and the monitoring tool Grafana Advisor has reached the public preview phase. Grafana 12.1 can be downloaded or used – with a free account – in the Grafana Cloud.

Grafana Advisor for automated health checks

The public preview of the Grafana Advisor monitoring tool, which was previously only available on an experimental basis, is available in all Grafana editions. The Grafana Advisor is designed to help admins run Grafana smoothly and securely. It performs regular health checks on their Grafana server and provides tips for optimizing system performance. The health checks currently relate to data source connections, plug-ins and SSO settings. However, the Grafana Advisor functions are to be expanded in the future.

In Grafana Cloud, the tool is already activated by default, while in Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise it can be activated with the feature toggle grafanaAdvisor.

As Grafana Advisor is still in the preview phase, future breaking changes are possible and the manufacturer only offers limited support. Interested parties can provide feedback, for example on feature requests or bugs that have arisen, via the online form.

Updates for notifications and visualizations

Grafana 12.1 comes with new features for notifications, including a revised alert rules page. An alert rule consists of a set of evaluation criteria that determine when a notification should occur. As Grafana Labs explains, users can have hundreds or thousands of such rules in use.

The renewed page is intended to provide an overview of existing alert rules and offers two view options: a Grouped View, which is sorted by namespaces, and a List View, which displays a complete list of all rules. The new page only concentrates on the most important information – for a clearer view than before. Again, in Grafana Cloud, the new view will reach users automatically over time, while for Grafana OSS it will be available via feature toggle (alertingListViewV2).

Other updates in Grafana 12.1 include features designed to allow greater flexibility and control over data visualizations. For example, the new transformation method Trendlines (regression analysis) is available and user-defined variables can be defined within visualization actions. The latter is intended to make actions more dynamic and interactive, as developers can adapt queries in real time.

Grafana Labs provides further information on the new release in a blog entry.

(mai)