Grafana 13: Faster dashboards, leaner logs, OpenTelemetry packages

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Grafana Labs presented version 13 of its open-source observability platform at its in-house trade fair, GrafanaCON 2026, in Barcelona. In addition to a number of new dashboard features, the release includes profound changes to the Grafana Loki log database and simplified installation packages for OpenTelemetry.

CLC 2026: Conference for DevEx and Platform Engineering

The CLC Conference, specializing in Developer Experience (DX) and Platform Engineering, will take place from November 11 to 12, 2026, in Mannheim. The expanded range of topics also covers areas such as Observability, SRE, Dev(Sec)Ops, and Containers and Kubernetes.

The Call for Proposals is still open until April 24, 2026.

As Grafana Labs explains in the announcement, the company is responding to a core problem for many IT teams with these innovations: According to the Observability Survey 2026 conducted by Grafana Labs, more than 38 percent of surveyed organizations cite complexity as the biggest challenge – while at the same time, over 77 percent rely on open-source or open standards.

Suggested Dashboards and Dynamic Dashboards

A central feature in Grafana 13 is suggested dashboards. This function analyzes connected data sources and suggests suitable dashboards based on a compatibility assessment, including pre-built templates for DORA metrics or USE/RED methods, for example. IT teams that use standardized monitoring methods should be able to achieve meaningful visualizations faster without having to start from scratch. The function is available as a public preview in all editions of Grafana 13.

Dynamic dashboards, which are based on a new dashboard schema (v2), are also generally available. They offer nesting, tabs, and drag-and-drop layouts, among other features. Also generally available in all editions: visualization suggestions, which automatically suggest suitable display formats for data based on metadata. Saved Queries allow the reuse of frequently used queries – a function that should particularly accelerate onboarding in larger teams.

Loki: Up to 20x Less Data Scanned

Grafana Labs has fundamentally revised the architecture for the Loki log database. A new query planner splits queries into parallel partitions and uses data locality to make accesses more efficient. In combination with an ingestion pipeline based on Apache Kafka, up to 20 times less data should be scanned for aggregation queries, and response times should decrease by a factor of 10. Companies with high log volumes should thus be able to significantly reduce their infrastructure costs for storage and computing power.

In addition, Grafana Labs has acquired the startup Logline, which specializes in high-performance search in log data with high cardinality. The technology developed by founder Jason Nochlin is intended to improve “needle-in-a-haystack” queries, such as searching for a specific user ID or a rare error code in large amounts of data. Integrated into Loki, Logline is intended to enable precise full-text search without increasing indexing overhead. This is particularly relevant for structured logs in the OpenTelemetry format with many unique attribute values.

Simplified OpenTelemetry Setup and Git Sync

Regarding OpenTelemetry (OTel), Grafana 13 focuses on simplification: new integrated packages allow installation on Linux with a single command, and an operator is available for Kubernetes. The company's own OTel collector distribution, Grafana Alloy, now supports an OTel Engine mode with YAML configuration, making it easier to get started with telemetry instrumentation.

For team operation, Grafana 13 now provides a Git Sync function. Note for early adopters: A migration error in version 13.0.0 can reset dashboards and folders when upgrading from Grafana v12 with Git Sync enabled; Grafana Labs therefore recommends checking the upgrade notes in the documentation beforehand. Dashboards can be synchronized bidirectionally with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or generic Git repositories – a step towards Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for monitoring configurations. A revised Secrets Handling, Dashboard Restore, and the new Grafana Advisor for automatic health checks round off the release. According to the provider, Grafana 13 now supports over 170 data sources and 120 visualization panels.

Co-founder Anthony Woods emphasized in his keynote that the future of observability will be “defined by interoperability and community-driven innovation, not closed systems.” Grafana Labs claims to have more than 35 million users worldwide and employs over 1,400 people in more than 40 countries.

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