Upgrade to Grafana v8 - take 2

Last year we rolled out a major Grafana update, going from 7.5 to 8.1, but had to roll back because a small number of customers were impacted by a breaking change regarding SQL datasources.

Meanwhile we’ve taken the time to investigate the breaking changes and how these impact some of our customers and we’ve decided to finally upgrade to Grafana 8 again.

This upgrade is in the process of being rolled out. There are no actions for you to take if you’re not using a Postgres, MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server data source.

For the customers who were directly impacted, we’ve already taken the liberty of updating / fixing your dashboards. If you still notice any issues, please let us know and check out the Migration steps below.

Migration steps

If you’re using a SQL data source and you notice your Graph panels are no longer working as before, you can try these steps.

In general, the cause of the issues is that data handling of SQL data sources has changed.

  1. For panels where the time value is not need, like Pie Chart: set query Format As to Table

    2022-03-31_16-54-55

    Optional: move to the new Pie Chart panel

  2. For the old Graph (old) panel, using time series data, if the graph looks “funky”, eg. with the popover showing a lot of empty values:

    • Set query Format As to Table
    • Add transformation: Prepare time series with Format Multi-frame time series
    • Add transformation: Labels to fields and set Value field name to metric (or another appropriate field)

    2022-03-31_16-55-00

  3. In general also make sure that panels with multiple queries have correctly sorted queries, or the Z-indexing can be wrong.

    2022-03-31_17-19-38

Release notes

  • Grafana What’s new in Grafana v8.0
    • Library panels: users can build panels to be used in multiple dashboard
    • Built-in Prometheus metrics browser
    • New visualizations: bar chart, state timeline, status history, histogram
    • Many updated visualizations
    • Improvements to the (Loki) log browser
    • Performance improvements
    • And many more…
  • Grafana v8.4.5
    • Small enhancements and bug fixes