Grafana Labs has released Grafana 12.1, introducing new features designed to enhance system reliability, alert management, and dashboard interactivity. Key additions include Grafana Advisor, a redesigned alerting interface, trendline transformations, improved variable handling, and support for modern authentication and cloud integrations.
Grafana Advisor performs scheduled health checks across Grafana instances and provides administrators with remediation suggestions. It monitors data sources, plugins, and SSO setups to detect misconfigurations or missing dependencies. Grafana Advisor is available across all editions and can be activated in both open-source and Enterprise versions using a feature toggle.
Alerting capabilities have also been enhanced. The new rule list interface supports both grouped and flat views, improving visibility for teams managing large rule sets. A paginated API has been added for performance at scale, and users can now import Prometheus alert rules directly into the UI.
On the data visualisation side, Grafana 12.1 introduces trendline transformations. These enable users to apply linear or polynomial regression to time-series data to highlight patterns or extrapolate future values. Grafana Labs described the feature as “great for spotting patterns in fluctuating or inconsistent time series” and noted that it “allows you to infer what the data was at a point that may not be exactly represented in the original dataset, or plot predicted values in the future.” Dashboard interactivity is also improved through support for custom variables in panel actions, enabling prompt-based user input when triggering APIs or navigation actions.
Guillermo Ruiz, Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, called Grafana 12 “not marketing fluff,” adding that “this one hits hard for platform engineers… Grafana 12 makes it finally easier to scale dashboarding across teams without chaos.”
Community feedback has been mostly positive. One user on Reddit described Grafana 12.1 as offering “automated health checks for your Grafana instance, streamlined views in Grafana Alerting, visualization updates, and more”, highlighting the practical impact of the release’s key improvements.
Grafana 12.1 is available on Grafana Cloud and for self-hosted installations. Some capabilities require feature toggles. Full documentation is available in the release blog and changelog.
