Grafana 13 Deep Dive: Suggested Dashboards, Dynamic Dashboards, SQL Expressions, and More!

The most ambitious Grafana dashboard release yet. In this GrafanaCON 2026 deep dive, three teams walk through every major capability landing in Grafana 13 — from AI-assisted dashboard creation to dynamic multi-audience dashboards to tools that make running Grafana at enterprise scale dramatically easier.

Alexa (Grafana staff engineer) opens with the blank-page problem: how do you build a valuable dashboard when you don't know where to start? She demos Suggested Dashboards — community dashboards now natively inside Grafana, with a compatibility score that shows how much overlap a dashboard has with your actual data sources. She then covers Dashboard Templates (five built-in methodology frameworks: DORA, Northstar, USE, Service Health, and more), Visualization Suggestions that recommend chart types based on your query shape, and a sneak peek at Org-Defined Templates — save any dashboard as a reusable RBAC-controlled starting point for your whole organization.

Dominik and Bogdan (principal/staff engineers) tackle dashboards at scale. Their thesis: maintaining three separate dashboards for sales, marketing, and engineering — all observing the same platform — is unsustainable. They demo Tabs (merge multiple dashboards into a single URL), the Filters Bar (auto-injected global filters with no query editing required), Section-Level Variables (scope variables to a specific tab so engineering gets namespace/pod dropdowns but sales doesn't), Auto Grid (responsive panel layout that adapts to screen size without manual resizing), Content Outline (table of contents for large multi-tab dashboards), Show-Hide Rules (conditionally reveal panels based on variable selection), and SQL Expressions (join and transform results across multiple queries using standard SQL syntax). They close with the Dashboards API v2 going GA — a modern, Kubernetes-resource-model API that works with Terraform, Git Sync, and the new gcx CLI.

Stephanie and Artur (principal engineer + engineering manager) wrap with what it means to operate Grafana as critical infrastructure. They demo Native Dashboard Restore (a "recently deleted" tab in the UI — no more database digging), Grafana Advisor GA (a centralized health-check panel that surfaces failing data sources, outdated plugins, and missing installs, with Grafana Assistant integration for guided troubleshooting), and SCIM GA (System for Cross-Domain Identity Management — sync users and groups from Okta or Entra ID before their first login, with a new config UI so you don't need the config file).

00:00 What's New in Grafana 13: Overview
00:06:18 Suggested Dashboards
00:12:54 Dashboard Templates (DORA, USE, Service Health)
00:16:45 Visualization Suggestions & Panel Styles
00:18:37 Org-Defined Templates (Sneak Peek)
00:21:21 Dynamic Dashboards at Scale — Dominik & Bogdan
00:24:49 Tabs: Merge Multiple Dashboards into One URL
00:26:40 Filters Bar
00:27:27 Section-Level Variables
00:29:14 Auto Grid & Content Outline
00:31:19 Show-Hide Rules
00:33:47 SQL Expressions
00:37:07 Dashboards API v2 (Now GA)
00:39:50 Operating Grafana at Scale — Stephanie & Artur
00:42:54 Native Dashboard Restore
00:44:51 Grafana Advisor (Now GA)
00:46:47 SCIM: User & Group Sync from Your IDP

Links/resources:
Read the Grafana 13 announcement blog: https://grafana.com/blog/grafana-13-release-all-the-latest-features/?src=yt
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

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