Analytics and monitoring tool Grafana has hit v6.6, enhancing alerts and adding new stat and news panels to the project.
While the news panel can be used to show RSS feeds as news items in the home dashboard, the new Stat panel has been introduced to replace Singlestat. The panel allows the display of single numbers and sparklines and features automatic handling of font size and layout. Compared to Singlestat, Stat is built on the project’s new panel infrastructure meaning the new threshold UI and data links can be used.
In other panel news, Grafana will now calculate the min and max for Gauge, Bar Gauge, and Stat, if these settings are left empty. Explore/Logs will now by default wrap the lines of overly long log messages and sports a unique labels column. The latter has been added as a reaction on the feedback the team got when it got rid of the labels column.
Explore now has also a context tooltip for copying data and labels, while all panels now support custom units, which can be set as a suffix or prefix via a custom option in the unit picker. Moreover, the Grafana team redesigned the time picker to be more user-friendly. It now offers a selection of recently used absolute time ranges for better planning, shows when from or to inputs have focus, and includes a single calendar view to select and show the from and to date.
Stepping away from the dashboards and into alerting, a new configuration that enforces a minimal interval between evaluations is supposed to reduce the backend load. Apart from that some notifiers have been supplemented with additional information, and ops wanting the tool to send a single email to all recipients have that option available to them now.
Users will be pleased to hear that breaking changes in Grafana 6.6 have been kept to a minimum. However, the cookie_samesite setting had to be modified in order to make it work with Chrome 80. It now properly renders cookies with SameSite=None when the setting is none instead of excluding the attribute from cookies.
There is an upgrade guide in place for those that run into trouble when switching to the new version.