What’s New in Grafana 8.0? A Deep Dive into Alerts, Panels, and Real‑Time Streaming

Introduction

Grafana v8.0 brings major changes, including a complete redesign of the alerting system; new visualizations such as state timeline, history, and histogram panels; real‑time streaming; reusable library panels; and fine‑grained access control that lets enterprise users assign appropriate access levels.

Performance and UI upgrades give Grafana a fresh look, faster dashboard loading via data source query caching, and better startup and load performance thanks to reduced initial data download.

For more details, watch the Grafana 8.0 deep‑dive session at GrafanaCONline on June 9, and explore the new Grafana Play dashboard for v8 features.

1. Alerting

Grafana 8.0 unifies Prometheus‑style alerts and Grafana alerts in a single UI for creating, editing, and viewing alerts across open‑source, enterprise, and cloud stacks. Alerts are now decoupled from dashboards, with support for multi‑dimensional alerts, notification policies for large‑scale management, and a full‑featured API.

2. Value Mapping

The new value mapping editor lets you map strings and boolean states directly to colors and optional display text, working across all Grafana visualizations, including the new state timeline panel.

3. State Timeline Panel

The "State Timeline" panel visualizes string or boolean states over time, allowing color assignment per value and threshold‑based discrete state visualization.

4. History Panel

The History panel shows state retrospectives, visualizing periodic data over time with optional color mapping for numeric, string, or boolean states.

5. Bar Chart Panel

The new bar chart panel adds drawing capabilities for non‑time‑series data, supporting categorical X or Y fields, grouped bars, and both horizontal and vertical layouts.

6. Histogram Panel

Previously a hidden feature, the histogram panel is now a standalone visualization that can combine bucketed histogram data with bar chart visualizations, and can be paired with any other visualization.

7. Panel Search and Table View Toggle

Search functionality has been added to help locate panels in long lists, and a new table view toggle lets you quickly inspect the data passed to visualizations.

8. Library Panels

A new workflow enables reusable library panels that can be shared across multiple dashboards; changes to a library panel propagate to all dashboards that use it.

9. Real‑Time Streaming

Real‑time streaming, introduced as a preview in 7.4, gains more features in 8.0, supporting MQTT data source websockets, cURL, or Telegraf streams, and a new endpoint /api/live/push for pushing events to dashboards.

10. Loki Log Improvements

Log navigation in Explore has been enhanced with pagination, allowing you to view older or newer logs when line limits are reached, and logs can be downloaded as text files from the panel inspector.

11. Expanded Traces Support

You can now query Grafana Loki directly from Grafana Tempo to search traces, and Tempo query panels help build Loki queries without deep LogQL expertise, offering a unified trace discovery experience with Jaeger, Zipkin, and Tempo support.

12. More Information

See the documentation and release notes for a complete list of new features, changes, and bug fixes. Subscribe to upcoming webinars for deeper insights into dashboards, the Grafana 8 UI, and monitoring web services with Prometheus and Loki.

13. Upgrading to Grafana 8.0

Download and install Grafana 8.0 or try Grafana 8.0 Cloud at https://grafana.com/get/. For upgrade instructions, refer to https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/installation/upgrading/.

Translator’s Note

We have been following and using Grafana products such as Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki; the mica‑logging component also adds Loki support. Stay tuned for more updates.