Grafana update - 2020-10-13

[Daniel Lee]

Hi all,

A quick update about what is happening with the Grafana team.

Grafana 7.3 status

The beta will be released this week - currently looks like it will be on Thursday, the 15th. The full release will be done before ObservabilityCon starts on the 26th. Looks like there will be some very cool demos that we can show at the conference!

Grafana 7.4 timeline

We will have two weeks between the 7.3 and 7.4 releases to spend some extra time on non-feature activities - bug fixing, improving our infrastructure (CI, Storybook and other tools) etc. The 7.4 release date will be in January with most of the development done before the Christmas/New Year break and the beta period after New Year.

Grafana 8 planning

We have started planning for Grafana 8 so more to come on that in the next Grafana weekly. If you want to be involved in the process or want to know more at this early stage, then let the Grafana team know. 

The main themes will be:

• Alerting
• Improving ease of use
• Dashboard maintenance
• Tracing and Logs
• Improving Elasticsearch data source
• Full-featured visualizations
• Plugins platform

A very rough overview of some of the headline features (WIP - everything can change) is:

• Alerting: Alerting Next Generation - a rewrite of the alerting engine in Grafana
• Alerting: Backend expressions - a meta query language that will be used together with alerting and for backfilling query languages with features they don't support (like adding maths to Elasticsearch queries for example)
• Ease of use: UI query builders for Prometheus and Loki
• Ease of use: Programmatic dynamic dashboards (see below for more details)
• Ease of use: Improved navigation
• Ease of use: Auto save for dashboards (https://github.com/grafana/grafana/pull/27583) (and other websocket/streaming features)
• Dashboard maintenance: Shared/reusable panels (design doc)
• Dashboard maintenance: A defined dashboard schema with dashboard validation and being able to build dashboards with a code first approach in the Grafana UI
• Porting Elasticsearch from Angular to React (and then either Lucene autocomplete or maybe support for the ES SQL interface)
• Logs: Support for LokiQL v2
• Tracing - watch the sessions at ObservabilityCon to learn more about this

Programmatic Dynamic Dashboards (probably not what they will be called but I don't have a better name right now)

Jostein and Kristian from Telenor have written on the mailing list about collaborating on a replacement for the deprecated scripted dashboards feature in Grafana. There is a meeting on Thursday morning (CEST). You can follow along in the discussion on the mailing list or join the meeting if you are interested (ask Daniel for an invitation). Torkel will be presenting his prototype: https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/grafana-developers/c/3VCiSwrOKOQ

Design Docs

Here are some of the current draft/in-flight design documents that the Grafana team is working on (ping me if you need access to any of these Google docs):

• Grafana API Enhancements
• Elasticsearch data source overhaul
• Grafana OAuth Enhancements
• Shared Panels
• Grafana Annotation & Exemplar Query & Data flows

New members on the Grafana project team

We have added two new people, Fredrik Enestad and Alexander Khomenko to the Grafana project (which means they have write permissions on GitHub for the Grafana repo). List of members can be found in our Governance doc.

/Daniel

[Arnaud GENTY]

Nice program

Welcome to  Fredrik Enestad  and  Alexander

BR 

Arnaud