Yesterday, the Grafana team made Grafana 5.3 stable. This version comes with several enhancements and new features including built-in support for Google Stackdriver, improved TV and Kiosk mode, a new query builder for Postgres, and more.
Built-in support for Google Stackdriver
Grafana 5.3 provides built-in support for Google Stackdriver to enable visualizing the Stackdriver metrics in Grafana.
Google Stackdriver is a monitoring service that aggregates metrics, logs, and events from infrastructure. It gives developers and operators a rich set of observable signals that speed root-cause analysis and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
You just have to create a GCE Service account that has access to the Stackdriver API scope. After that download the Service Account key file from Google and upload it on the Stackdriver datasource config page in Grafana and you should have a secure server-to-server authentication setup.
Easily accessible TV and Kiosk Mode
Now a view mode icon is displayed in the top bar to easily cycle through different view modes. Choosing the first view mode will hide the sidebar and most of the buttons in the top bar. In the second view mode, the top bar will be completely hidden and only the dashboard is visible.
Notification reminders
Now it is possible to set reminders so that you are continuously alerted until the problem is fixed. This is done on the notification channel itself and will affect all alerts that use that channel.
Introducing a new Postgres query builder
Grafana 5.3 provides a new graphical query builder for Postgres. This query builder makes it easier for both advanced users and beginners to work with time-series in Postgres. You can find it in the metrics tab in Graph or Singlestat panel’s edit mode.
Improved OAuth support for Gitlab
It comes with a new OAuth integration for Gitlab that enables configuration to only authenticate users that are a member of certain Gitlab groups. With this integration, you can now use Gitlab OAuth with Grafana in a shared environment without giving everyone access to Grafana
Variables with free text support
A new variable type named, Text box is introduced which makes it easier and more convenient to provide free text input to a variable. This new variable type will display as a free text input field with an optional pre-filled default value.
Read the full changelog on Grafana’s official website and also check its GitHub repository.
Read Next
Predictive Analytics with AWS: A quick look at Amazon ML
Apache Kafka 2.0.0 has just been released
Installing and Configuring X-pack on Elasticsearch and Kibana