docs/sources/upgrade-guide/when-to-upgrade/index.md
At Grafana Labs, we believe in shipping features early and often, and in recent years we’ve increased our commitment to that philosophy.
We no longer wait for the yearly major release to give you access to the next big improvement. Instead, we regularly make new features, bug fixes, and security patches available to our self-managing users (Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise) throughout the year.
Having a dependable release process provides users like you with the best Grafana experience possible, and it provides the flexibility to upgrade in a manner that works best for you and your organization.
{{< admonition type="note" >}} Grafana Cloud follows a different release cadence than Grafana OSS and Enterprise. In Cloud, Grafana uses Rolling release channels. To learn more about release channels, refer to Rolling release channels for Grafana Cloud. {{< /admonition >}}
We split Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise releases into three main categories:
You can choose your cadence: For frequent self-managed updates, you should follow the minor release (for example, upgrade 11.1 to 11.2), which also gives you access to the latest features. If you need a longer period to review our new releases, you should follow the major releases. Both strategies get patching releases with security fixes (high severity security fixes also result in ad-hoc patch releases). We’ll get into additional guidance on upgrade cadences later in this guide.
We love sharing all our great features with you so you can leverage Grafana to its fullest. We also understand that complete release documentation allows you to upgrade with confidence. Whether it’s knowing that a bug has been fixed, seeing that a security vulnerability is patched, or understanding how to mitigate the impact of breaking changes, proper documentation allows you to make informed decisions about when to upgrade your local Grafana instances.
We provide release documentation in multiple places to address different needs:
Grafana currently follows a monthly release schedule. Below are the planned releases for the end of 2025 and the first part of 2026. However, these dates may be subject to change:
| Release date | Grafana versions | Release type |
|---|---|---|
| Aug. 12, 2025 | Supported versions | Patching |
| Sept. 23, 2025 | 12.2 & Supported versions | Minor & patching |
| Oct. 21, 2025 | Supported versions | Patching |
| Nov. 18, 2025 | 12.3 & Supported versions | Minor & patching |
| Dec. 16, 2025 | Supported versions | Patching |
| Jan. 13, 2026 | Supported versions | Patching |
| Feb. 24, 2026 | 12.4 & Supported versions | Minor & patching |
| Mar. 24, 2026 | Supported versions | Patching |
| TBD | Grafana 13 | Major |
We've enhanced our naming convention for security release versions to make it easier to clearly identify our security releases from our standard patching releases.
In the past, critical vulnerabilities triggered unscheduled releases that incremented the patch version (e.g., 10.3.0 to 10.3.1). However, we found that the naming convention for these releases didn't clearly communicate the nature of the update. For example, if there was a version change from 11.3.0 to 11.3.1, there was no indication whether it was a security fix, a bug fix, or a minor feature update. This lack of clarity led to confusion about the urgency and nature of the update.
{{< admonition type="note" >}}
Docker does not allow the plus sign (+) in image tag names. A plus sign (+) will be a rendered as a dash (-) in the docker tag.
{{< /admonition >}}
Our new approach directly addresses this issue. Going forward, security releases will be appended with "+security" to indicate that the release is the indicated version PLUS the security fix.
For example: A release named "11.2.3+security-01" would consist of what was released in 11.2.3 PLUS the indicated security fix. Once released, the security fix will also then be automatically included in all future releases of the impacted version.
This naming convention should make it easier to identify security updates and the Grafana version they're based on, allowing for a better understanding of the importance and urgency of each release.
Self-managed Grafana users have control over when they upgrade to a new version of Grafana. To help you make an informed decision about whether it’s time to upgrade, it’s important that you understand the level of support provided for your current version.
For self-managed Grafana (both Enterprise and OSS), the support for versions follows these rules:
Here is an overview of version support through 2026:
| Version | Release date | Support end date | Support level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11.3.x | October 22, 2024 | July 22, 2025 | Not Supported |
| 11.4.x | December 5, 2024 | September 5, 2025 | Not Supported |
| 11.5.x | January 28, 2025 | October 28, 2025 | Not Supported |
| 11.6.x (Last minor of 11) | March 25, 2025 | June 25, 2026 | Patch Support |
| 12.0.x | May 5, 2025 | February 5, 2026 | Not Supported |
| 12.1.x | July 22, 2025 | April 22, 2026 | Patch Support |
| 12.2.x | September 23, 2025 | June 23, 2026 | Patch Support |
| 12.3.x | November 19, 2025 | August 19, 2026 | Patch Support |
| 12.4.x (Last minor of 12) | February 24, 2026 | May 24, 2027 | Patch Support |
| 13.0.0 | TBD | TBD | Yet to be released |
Self-managed Grafana follows semantic-like versioning (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH). Here's how different types of releases work:
Major releases (e.g., 12.0.0, 13.0.0):
Minor releases (e.g., 12.3.0, 12.4.0):
Patch releases (e.g., 12.3.1, 12.3.2):
Support levels by version:
Full Support (current major version):
Patch Support (individual minor versions):
Not Supported: Versions beyond their support period receive no updates and should be upgraded.
Example: When 12.3.0 is released, it includes new features. Subsequent releases like 12.3.1 and 12.3.2 only include bug fixes and security updates. All new features developed after 12.3.0 wait until 12.4.0 is released.
A critical feature degradation usually meets one of the following criteria:
Based on your needs, choose your ideal upgrade strategy. Here’s what that might look like in practice:
| Strategy/cadence | Advantages/disadvantages | Example upgrade procedure |
|---|---|---|
| Minor / bi-monthly (11.1 to 11.2) | Our recommended strategy. It combines up-to-date, secure releases with access to latest features as soon as they're released. <ul><li>Small changelog to review</li><li>Highest compatibility with actively maintained plugins</li><li>Easy migration to Grafana Cloud</li></ul> | <ul><li>January 2025: You review the 11.5 changelog and deploy the release to testing</li><li>February 2025: You deploy 11.5 to production</li><li>March 2025: 11.6 is released</li></ul> |
| Major / yearly (10.0 to 11.0) | Yearly upgrade path that still gives access to up-to-date features presented at GrafanaCON.<ul><li>Big changelog to review</li><li>High compatibility with plugins</li><li>Relatively easy migration to Grafana Cloud</li></ul> | <ul><li>May 2024: 11.0 is released, you start a big changelog review</li><li>June 2024: You deploy 11.0 to testing</li><li>July 2024: You deploy 11.0 to production</li><li>May 2025: 12.0 is released</li></ul> |
| Previous major / yearly (10.4 to 11.6) | Release with extended support timeline<ul><li>Limited compatibility with actively developed plugins</li><li>Big changelog to review</li><li>Migrations to Grafana Cloud might require professional support</li></ul> | <ul><li>May 2025: 12.0 is released, marking the previous minor (11.6.x) with extended support, you start a big changelog review (10.4.x to 11.6.x)</li><li>June 2025: You deploy 11.6.x to testing</li><li>July 2025: You deploy 11.6.x to production</li></ul> |
Follow the “minor” strategy for the most flexibility, as you can also occasionally lengthen the cadence to a full quarter and still rely on your currently deployed minor release being supported with security fixes.
Despite thorough testing, you can experience problems when upgrading:
Bugs are unexpected side effects of code changes in the release, which cause problems. Some bugs occur for all users, and we usually catch these in the early stages of testing. Others occur in a small number of Grafana instances with specific configuration or unusual use cases; for example a specific authentication setup or a combination of feature toggles. Grafana plugins also interact with external services via API to query data, and sometimes these APIs change without notice, causing issues for your dashboards that depend on these datasources. Grafana Labs has monitoring in place to regularly test these APIs, but at times they break in unexpected ways.
Reduce the risk of bugs by staying current and rolling out upgrades across dev or test environments before production. A Grafana Enterprise license entitles you to an additional dev and test instance for this purpose, available through your account team, and in Grafana Cloud you can create dev and test stacks that upgrade before production by using rolling release channels.
fast channel, and run your production stack on steady or slow. To change your release channel, open a support ticket.As a rule we always seek backward compatibility and migration, and reserve breaking changes for Grafana’s once-yearly major release. However occasionally small breaking changes (like updates to API payloads) will ship in minor releases. These are announced in upgrade guides, What’s New, and our changelog.
Always read the upgrade guide and changelog prior to upgrading to learn about and account for breaking changes.
Grafana core ships as a single binary and consists of Dashboards, Alerts, Explore, Authentication and Authorization, Reporting, some core data sources, and other components. However, almost everyone who uses Grafana also uses plugins: panels, data sources, and applications that are released independently of Grafana. Every plugin version lists its Grafana version dependencies (you can see them at https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/) but different versions of different plugins can also interact with each other - for example you might visualize data from a data source in a panel in Grafana, all three of which are versioned independently of each other. That can create issues that are hard to catch in testing.
To minimize the likelihood of plugin incompatibility issues, run the latest available version of plugins and update them regularly. Always update plugins before updating Grafana. Plugins also follow Semver patterns, so review the plugin’s changelog for breaking changes before upgrading to a new major version of that plugin.