Grafana 9 Released: RBAC by Default and a Traces Panel

What happened

Grafana 9.0.0 was released on June 14, 2022, according to the official GitHub release. It was a major version that brought security, visualization and alerting improvements across the platform.

RBAC and security

Grafana 9 enabled role-based access control (RBAC) by default and enabled envelope encryption by default, adding support for multiple data keys per day. The release also added identifiable token prefixes to service-account tokens and, as a breaking change, meant secrets created or modified with Grafana 9 could not be decrypted by earlier versions without enabling envelope encryption, reflecting a change in how encrypted secrets are stored.

Visualizations and tracing

The release added a new Traces panel visualization and let users filter traces by service, span name and operation in Tempo and Jaeger. It deprecated the old Graph panel so it was no longer offered for new panels, made SI number formats more robust, and let dashboards be validated against a schema on save.

Alerting and Loki

Grafana 9 added a general screenshot service so alert notifications across channels such as Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Discord and email could include image URLs or attachments, and added a reason to alert instances to show the underlying cause of a state. It enabled a new visual query builder for Loki by default, a new query history, and modified alerting endpoints to proxy requests using data-source UIDs instead of numeric identifiers.

Why it mattered

Grafana 9 hardened the platform with RBAC and envelope encryption by default while expanding its observability capabilities through the Traces panel and richer, image-enabled alerting. It laid a more secure and capable foundation for the major dashboard and exploration features that later Grafana versions would build on.

Related on Skillo

See also: Grafana 10's Correlations and Canvas GA.

Sources

• Grafana 9.0.0 release (GitHub)

Published date reflects the original event date (2022-06-14). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.