Grafana 6.2 released with improved security, enhanced provisioning, Bar Gauge panel, lazy loading and more

Last week, Torkel Ödegaard co-founder of Grafana released the stable version Grafana 6.2. This version has improved security, enhanced provisioning workflow, a new Bar Gauge panel, Elasticsearch 7 support, and lazy loading of panels, among other things.

Improved Security

Datasources will now store passwords and basic auth passwords in ‘secureJsonData’ which will be encrypted by default. Browser caching is now disabled for full page requests, which will enable mitigation of risky sensitive information. Upgrade notes is provided to migrate existing data sources to use encrypted storage.

Provisioning

Environment variables can now support and reload configs without restarting Grafana. This feature will not allow deletion of provisioned dashboards. Instead, when a user tries to delete or save a provisioned dashboard, a relative file path to the file is shown in the dialog.

Bar Gauge Panel

This is an exciting feature, which is similar to the current Gauge panel and shares almost all its options. Bar Gauge uses both horizontal and vertical spaces much better, which helps in stacking efficiently. The Bar Gauge also comes with three unique display modes: Basic, Gradient, and Retro LED.

Panels Without Title

Sometimes panels do not need a title, but still the panel header takes up space. This makes

‘Singlestats’ have bad vertical centering. In version 6.2, Grafana will now allow panel content to use the full panel height, in case there is no panel title.

Lazy Loading of Panels Out of View

Grafana will not issue any data queries for panels that are not visible. This will greatly reduce the load on the data source backends, when loading dashboards with many panels. This was one of the most requested features from Grafana users.

Minor Features and Fixes

User time zone support added, called ‘Explore’

Support for configuring timeout durations and retries

Support for multiple subscriptions per datasource

A small bug fixed which will display percentile metrics in table panel called ‘Elasticsearch’

‘InfluxDB’ to provide support for POST HTTP verb

‘CloudWatch’ is an important fix for default alias disappearing in v6.1

New ‘Search’ option

Ödegaard has also notified users to switch to the new repo soon, as the previous depreciated repo will be removed on July 1. The new repository will contain all the old releases, so the user will not have to upgrade to switch package repository.

Users of Grafana are quite happy with the new Grafana 6.2 version.

https://twitter.com/PeterZaitsev/status/1131211702169739269

A user on Hacker News commented, “Lazy loading is a feature I was waiting for long time, hopefully this time is here to stay!”

Another user added, “Those new gradient bar gauges look great, can't wait to use them on some environmental data.”

Read more about the Grafana v6.2 release on the Grafana blog.

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