Grafana Labs has announced the general availability of Grafana 9.0, featuring new visualizations and improvements to alerting, and the open source version of Grafana OnCall (already available in Grafana Cloud), a tool for on-call management.

For new users of the popular data sources Prometheus and Grafana Loki, writing and understanding queries can be hard. The visual query builders for these data sources lower the barrier to entry, so anyone can compose, understand, and learn how to use the underlying query languages.

Also, the previews provide an overview of all available dashboards and help you quickly identify the dashboard you need. You can also opt in to a new feature that allows you to search for terms in dashboard and panel titles.

Expand the navigation bar for a better overview of Grafana’s features and your installed integrations. You can opt in to access your starred dashboards directly from the navigation bar.

The new and improved heatmap panel is multiple orders of magnitude faster than its predecessor, and is capable of rendering multiple time series with thousands of data points each. Additionally, it introduces support for exemplars (traces) overlay and Prometheus sparse histograms.

In Grafana 8.0, an overhauled alerting system was introduced as an opt-in feature. The new system unified Prometheus alerting and Grafana alerting in the same user interface for viewing and editing, and provided a common experience for all Grafana users across open source, Enterprise, and Cloud. This alerting system is now the default in 9.0, and with that change comes considerable improvements to UX and documentation.

Grafana now offers by default envelope encryption for secrets in the database, adding a layer of indirection to the encryption process via a set of keys called data encryption keys (DEKs).

Grafana 9.0 is now available to both open source and Grafana Enterprise users, and Grafana Cloud users are getting automatically upgraded.

Grafana OnCall is available via open source software for self-managed and on-premises environments, in addition to all paid and free plans of the fully managed Grafana Cloud offering.