Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is launching Grafana 13, along with a wave of open source updates anchored by a next-generation Grafana Loki architecture, and simpler paths to OpenTelemetry on Linux and Kubernetes. These announcements were made at at GrafanaCON 2026.
“We’re seeing a clear shift in how organizations think about observability. It’s no longer about choosing a single vendor; it’s about building on open foundations,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder, Grafana Labs. “Open source, open standards, and an open ecosystem give teams the control and flexibility they need in a world that’s only getting more complex. The future of observability will be defined by interoperability and community-driven innovation, not closed systems. What we’re announcing at GrafanaCON today helps make that open model not just possible, but practical at scale.”
According to the company, Grafana 13 is built to shorten the path from raw telemetry to decisions teams can act on. Highlights include:
- Faster time-to-value through suggested dashboards, layout templates, and guided onboarding that reduce the blank-page problem for new and growing teams.
- More flexible dashboards, including layout improvements and service health perspectives oriented around latency, traffic, and errors so engineering, platform, and leadership audiences can each see what matters.
- Dynamic dashboards, now generally available, allow dashboards to adapt based on variables, context, and user needs instead of multiplying static copies.
- Programmability and governance at scale, including a redesigned dashboard schema, a versioned dashboard API, Git-based workflows, team folders, improved secrets handling, and restore and advisory tooling for safer change management.
- Expanded ecosystem support, with more than 170 data sources and 120 visualization panels, plus continued guidance on repeatable patterns and best practices.
As observability data continues to evolve, Grafana Labs is also rethinking how logs are stored and queried at scale. The rise of structured logs and OpenTelemetry has fundamentally changed how teams use logs, shifting from simple search toward more analytical, high-cardinality queries, making it critical to rethink the system design to address performance bottlenecks and increasing infrastructure costs.
To address this, Grafana Labs introduced a major evolution of Grafana Loki, designed for modern log use cases and next-generation scale, specifically:
- Kafka-backed ingestion for more efficient, durable pipelines at the ingestion layer.
- A redesigned query engine and scheduler to better handle large-scale analytical workloads. A new query planner will distribute work across partitions and execute queries in parallel, optimizing for data locality and maximizing throughput, and allowing Loki to process significantly less data per query while returning results faster.
Together, these changes deliver up to 20x less data scanned and 10x faster performance on aggregated queries, making it possible to answer complex questions across massive log datasets with far greater efficiency, the company said.
Grafana Labs continues to invest in an open observability model built on open standards and a broad ecosystem, anchored by Prometheus and OpenTelemetry.
Grafana Labs engineers are working with the broader community to help make OpenTelemetry easier to install and operate. These include integrated OpenTelemetry packages for Linux environments, enabling installation with a single command, and enhanced support for Kubernetes through the OpenTelemetry Operator.
Grafana Labs is also contributing to ecosystem-wide efforts to stabilize instrumentation, semantic conventions, and distributions, helping make OpenTelemetry more consistent and production-ready across teams, the company said.
For more information about this news, visit https://grafana.com.