Grafana Labs have launched Grafana 12, bringing significant updates to its visualisation and dashboarding platform. Several new key features are now generally available, including Git Sync, dynamic dashboards, and improvements to Drilldown which gives code-free point-and-click insights into data, and a Cloud Migration assistant.
A central feature of Grafana 12 is a new collection of observability-as-code tools, designed to help teams automate observability workflows. The experimental Git Sync feature lets users mirror Grafana dashboard and folder configuration to a Git repository directly in the Grafana interface, and there are plans to expand this to more resources in the future.
In an interview at GrafanaCON 2025 with DevOps Consultant Nasiullha Chaudhari for the "Cloud Champ" YouTube channel, Grafana founder and creator Torkel Ödegaard shared some context about Grafana's newest features, such as Git Sync.
Git Sync integration is something we've been talking about for many years... [It] makes it so much easier to get started and use dashboards or observability as code.
- Martin Ödegaard
Ödegaard elaborated on the idea of observability-as-code, describing it as "an extension of infrastructure as code," which allows users to define "your dashboards, your alert rules, your notification systems" through version control. The new feature addresses a challenge many users faced: "That's always been the big problem with people who have done this in the past... they kind of lose a lot of the flexibility of editing dashboards from the UI."
Other changes include experimental dynamic dashboards with functionality such as contextual tabs, conditional rendering, and auto-grid panel layouts that adapt to different screen sizes. Grafana 12 also has performance improvements, with the table visualisation now using react-data-grid, resulting in 97.8% faster CPU performance when handling large datasets. Users can also experiment with several new themes.
Enterprise and Cloud Advanced users gain access to SCIM provisioning in public preview, while SQL expressions are now in private preview across all versions. This allows users to manipulate data from multiple sources without external ETL processes. A new migration tool preserves behaviour when converting alert rules, and Grafana Drilldown apps are now generally available.
Traces Drilldown enables users to visualise insights from Tempo traces data through automatic visualisations and RED metrics for issue investigation and monitoring without the need to write TraceQL queries. Metrics Drilldown simplifies metric management, and key new features include new prefix and suffix filter options and grouping metrics by labels for better organisation and context. Users can also sort metrics based on recent history, associated dashboards, and related alerts.
Logs Drilldown offers expanded capabilities for visualising and analysing log data. This includes targeted log retrieval through multiple inclusion filters within Drilldown queries, allowing for more nuanced and specific log searches with regex support too. Users can now explore JSON-formatted log entries with a dedicated visualisation tool, making complex data structures easier to read and interpret.
Investigations lets users add panels from all of the Metrics, Logs, and Traces Drilldown apps directly into a single view to speed up building insights into anomalies and correlations across these different techniques.
The Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant has reached general availability. It offers automated migration from OSS or Enterprise installations to Grafana Cloud. Users can now select which resources to migrate, and the migration results table can be sorted and filtered.
In a LinkedIn post, senior specialist solutions architect Guillermo Ruiz from AWS is effusive about the Grafana 12 launch.
Not marketing fluff. This one hits hard for platform engineers and anyone serious about observability.
- Guillermo Ruiz
Ruiz goes on to laud Grafana's platform-level thinking and commends the ease of scaling dashboarding across teams. "Grafana 12 has turned into a real push toward platform unification, observability as code, and customizability without compromise," he concludes.
In the YouTube interview, Ödegaard also addressed how the Grafana team balances adding advanced capabilities while keeping the platform accessible. "This has been the biggest conundrum or biggest challenge for me over most of the years: how to make Grafana a very powerful advanced tool that meets the needs for technically advanced users while also making it accessible for everyone," he shared. Ödegaard noted their approach involves careful feature selection and UX considerations: "Every new feature needs to have a pretty strong justification... because every new feature almost every case makes it more complicated."
Looking ahead, Grafana is also developing an AI assistant, which Ödegaard believes will be "key in making every Grafana user an expert quickly and levelling them up" in terms of understanding observability, operating the platform, and troubleshooting issues.
There are some breaking changes in Grafana 12 that users should be aware of, including the removal of Angular plugin support and stricter data source requirements. Grafana 12 is available now for download or through Grafana Cloud's free and paid tiers.