v6.2 Stable Release!

It’s finally time for a new Grafana release again. Grafana 6.2 includes improved security, enhanced provisioning workflow, a new Bar Gauge panel, Elasticsearch 7 support, and lazy loading of panels, among other things.

What’s New in Grafana v6.2

Download Grafana 6.2 Now

Check out the demo dashboard of some of the new features in v6.2.

Improved Security

Datasources now store passwords and basic auth passwords in secureJsonData encrypted by default. Existing datasource with unencrypted passwords will keep working. Read the upgrade notes on how to migrate existing datasources to use encrypted storage.

To mitigate the risk of Clickjacking, embedding Grafana is no longer allowed per default. Read the upgrade notes for further details of how this may affect you.

To mitigate the risk of sensitive information being cached in browser after a user has logged out, browser caching is now disabled for full page requests.

Provisioning

Environment variables support: See Using environment variables for more information.

Reload provisioning configs: See Admin HTTP API for more information.

Does not allow deletion of provisioned dashboards.

When trying to delete or save provisioned dashboard, relative file path to the file is shown in the dialog.

Official Support for Elasticsearch 7

Grafana v6.2 ships with official support for Elasticsearch v7. See Using Elasticsearch in Grafana for more information.

Bar Gauge Panel

Grafana v6.2 ships with a new exciting panel! This new panel, named Bar Gauge, is very similar to the current Gauge panel and shares almost all its options. The main difference is that the Bar Gauge uses both horizontal and vertical space much better and can be more efficiently stacked both vertically and horizontally. The Bar Gauge also comes with three unique display modes: Basic, Gradient, and Retro LED. Read the preview article to learn more about the design and features of this new panel.

Retro LED Display Mode

Gradient Mode

Check out the Bar Gauge Demo Dashboard.

Improved Table Data Support

We have been working on improving table support in our new react panels (Gauge & Bar Gauge), and this is ongoing work that will eventually come to the new Graph, Singlestat, and Table panels we are working on. But you can see it already in the Gauge and Bar Gauge panels. Without any config, you can visualize any number of columns or choose to visualize each row as its own gauge.

Lazy Loading of Panels Out of View

This has been one of the most requested features for many years and is now finally here! Lazy loading of panels means Grafana will not issue any data queries for panels that are not visible. This will greatly reduce the load on your data source backends when loading dashboards with many panels.

Have a look at the demo dashboard, and try the new lazy loading feature.

Panels Without Title

Sometimes your panels do not need a title, and having that panel header still takes up space, making singlestats and other panels look strange and have bad vertical centering. In v6.2, Grafana will allow panel content (visualizations) to use the full panel height in case there is no panel title.

Have a look at the demo dashboard to get a feel for how panels without title works.

Minor Features and Fixes

This release contains a lot of small features and fixes:

Explore: Adds user time zone support, reconnect for failing datasources, and a fix that prevents killing Prometheus instances when Histogram metrics are loaded.

Alerting: Adds support for configuring timeout durations and retries. See configuration for more information.

Azure Monitor: Adds support for multiple subscriptions per datasource.

Elasticsearch: A small bug fix to properly display percentile metrics in table panel.

InfluxDB: Support for POST HTTP verb.

CloudWatch: Important fix for default alias disappearing in v6.1.

Search: Works in a scope of dashboard’s folder by default when viewing dashboard.

Removal of Old Deprecated Package Repository

Five months ago, we deprecated our old package cloud repository and replaced it with our own. We will remove the old depreciated repo on July 1. Make sure you have switched to the new repo by then. The new repository has all our old releases, so you are not required to upgrade just to switch package repository.

Changelog

Check out the CHANGELOG.md file for a complete list of new features, changes, and bug fixes.

Download

Head to the download page for download links & instructions.

Upgrading

Read important upgrade notes.

Thanks

A big thanks to all the Grafana users who contribute by submitting PRs, bug reports, and feedback!