Grafana 13.3 adds cross-dashboard variables and investigation notebooks

Grafana Labs has released version 13.3 of its open-source observability platform, introducing tools designed to reduce configuration drift and streamline incident investigations. The update, published on October 29, 2026, focuses on consistency across dashboards and better documentation workflows for engineering teams managing their own infrastructure.

What happened

The release introduces cross-dashboard variables, allowing administrators to define a variable once and reuse it across multiple dashboards within an organization or folder. Previously, teams had to manage identical variables, such as environment selectors or region filters, separately in each dashboard. This duplication often led to configuration drift, where one dashboard would update while others remained stale. With this new feature, users can create global or folder-scoped variables from a central menu. When editing a dashboard, users can select these shared variables from the sidebar, ensuring that controls remain consistent without requiring manual edits to every individual dashboard.

Grafana 13.3 also launches Notebooks, a feature designed to capture and share investigative findings in a single, editable document. Investigations often involve jumping between dashboard panels, the Explore view, and AI-assisted queries, scattering evidence across different tabs and chat threads. Notebooks allow users to pull panels from dashboards or Explore directly into a document, adding written observations next to the data. This creates a persistent record of an investigation that teammates can review later. Users can create these notebooks manually or with the help of Grafana Assistant, and they can be searched, filtered, and exported for future reference.

Key details

• Cross-dashboard variables are available in public preview for all editions and require enabling the grafana.dashboardGlobalVariables feature toggle in self-managed instances.
• Variables can be scoped as Global, available to every dashboard in the organization, or Folder, limited to dashboards within the same folder.
• Notebooks are gradually rolling out to Grafana Cloud and require the dashboard.notebooks feature toggle for self-managed deployments.
• The release includes the first phase of a major visual refresh since Grafana 7, featuring new default dark and light themes, rounder corners, and updated typography.
• Grafana Assistant now supports dashboard plans, allowing users to preview a proposed dashboard structure before building it, and includes an undo function to revert AI-generated changes.
• The visual refresh is non-breaking, meaning existing workflows and navigation remain unchanged, and plugins using standard components will automatically adopt the new look.

Background

Grafana is a widely used open-source platform for monitoring and observability, allowing teams to visualize metrics from various data sources like Prometheus, InfluxDB, or Elasticsearch. A core component of Grafana is the dashboard, which aggregates panels displaying graphs, tables, or logs. Variables in Grafana are dynamic inputs that allow users to filter data, such as selecting a specific server cluster or time range. Traditionally, these variables were local to each dashboard, meaning any change to a common filter had to be replicated manually across dozens of dashboards.

Notebooks represent a shift toward collaborative documentation within the monitoring tool itself. Instead of relying on external wikis or screenshot-heavy ticketing systems, engineers can now keep their reasoning and data side-by-side. This context is critical for post-incident reviews, where understanding the thought process behind a query is as important as the query result. The visual refresh aims to modernize the interface without disrupting established user habits, focusing on readability and component consistency.

Why it matters

For teams that self-host their monitoring stack, configuration drift is a significant maintenance burden. When variables are managed individually, a change in infrastructure naming conventions or environment tags requires updating every affected dashboard. Cross-dashboard variables centralize this management, reducing the risk of human error and saving engineering time. This consistency ensures that when a developer switches between dashboards, the filtering logic remains uniform, leading to faster and more accurate data interpretation.

The introduction of Notebooks addresses the knowledge loss that often occurs during incident response. In high-pressure situations, engineers may find the root cause but fail to document the steps taken to get there. By embedding findings directly into the platform, teams create a searchable history of investigations. This reduces the time required for new team members to understand historical issues and prevents repeated work. The ability to export these notebooks also facilitates compliance and reporting requirements without leaving the monitoring ecosystem.

What you can do

• Enable the grafana.dashboardGlobalVariables feature toggle in your self-managed Grafana instance to test cross-dashboard variables in a staging environment.
• Identify commonly used variables across your dashboards, such as region or service name, and plan their migration to global or folder-scoped definitions.
• Activate the dashboard.notebooks toggle to experiment with capturing investigation steps during your next minor incident or routine data exploration.
• Review your current dashboards against the new visual refresh by enabling the grafana.visualDesignRefresh toggle, noting any custom CSS that might need adjustment.
• Use the Grafana Assistant’s new dashboard plan preview to validate AI-generated dashboard structures before committing them to production.
• Test the undo functionality in Grafana Assistant to ensure your team can safely experiment with AI-driven dashboard edits without fear of breaking existing layouts.