Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Who says 13 is unlucky? With the release of Grafana 13, we're giving the community the most streamlined, flexible, and intuitive Grafana experience yet. Unveiled during the opening keynote of GrafanaCON 2026, the latest major release is all about helping you get value from your data faster, whether you’re spinning up dashboards, operating Grafana at scale, or extending the platform as your requirements change. Download Grafana 13.

The ways you and your teams build and observe your systems are changing. It’s no longer just engineers looking at dashboards, or writing queries or config files. More often, it’s an agent interacting with the data, too, helping write code, run applications, investigate incidents, rightsize deployments, and more.

Continuous profiling is becoming a standard part of the observability stack, and for good reason. It's the only signal that tells you why your code is slow or expensive, not just that it is. Metrics tell you CPU usage is high. Logs tell you a request was slow. Traces tell you which service is the bottleneck. But only a profile tells you which function, on which line, is burning the cycles. As systems grow more complex, that level of visibility becomes essential.

GrafanaCON 2026 kicked off in Barcelona, which is a fitting city to reveal the latest updates in Grafana 13. In 2013, Grafana Labs Co-founder Torkel Ödegaard made the first commit for what would become Grafana while he was on vacation in the Catalan city. "I was traveling here for the Christmas holiday and I got a cold and spent most of the day in bed coding and working on Grafana," said Torkel during the opening keynote of GrafanaCON, our biggest community event of the year.

If you're running Databricks workloads, you've probably asked yourself these types of questions: How much is this costing me? Why did that job fail last night? Why are my dashboard queries suddenly slow? We've been there, too. Databricks is fantastic for data engineering, ML, and analytics. But once you start running jobs, pipelines, and SQL queries at scale, you need a way to keep tabs on what's happening. That's why we built the Databricks integration for Grafana Cloud.

Alerts are meant to help teams respond quickly to problems, but too often they arrive without enough context to be immediately useful. An alert that says “CPU usage is high” still leaves the on-call engineer asking critical follow-up questions: Which service? Which environment? Where do I look next? Validating the alert and triaging the situation is the first step for every engineer. It's a manual step that takes time, extending every potential incident.

When you identify CPU or memory spikes in your services, it’s critical to understand why they’re happening. But switching between tools or crafting complex queries can slow you down when trying to pinpoint a root cause. This is why we’re excited to share that Profiles Drilldown, an application that lets you easily explore profiling data through an intuitive, point-and-click interface (no queries required), is now integrated with Grafana Cloud Knowledge Graph.

The Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart is the easiest way to send metrics, logs, traces, and profiles from your Kubernetes clusters to Grafana Cloud (or a self-hosted Grafana stack). And version 4.0 is the biggest update the chart has ever received. Representing nearly six months of planning and development, it's designed to solve real pain points that users have hit as their monitoring setups have grown.

As teams scale, managing synthetic monitoring checks manually in the UI becomes difficult and error-prone. When you're dealing with dozens of checks across multiple environments, teams experience inconsistent configurations, lack of version control, and difficulty tracking changes.

For today's modern businesses, the data landscape demands security and flexibility. You need to connect your observability platform to rich, proprietary datasets that often reside in private networks without compromising security or managing complex network infrastructure. You may also face an extra layer of complexity in order to effectively query and visualize that data. Luckily, modern artificial intelligence tools have made these previously complicated processes much simpler.