Major Grafana upgrades whose technical notes require action on data sources, plugins, storage or automation before or after the upgrade.
Moving self-hosted Grafana from 11.x to 12: data source UID format enforcement and fixing dashboards and alert rules that reference bad UIDs, stricter plugin version checks in the CLI, the annotation table migration, and Angular plugin retirement.
Upgrading self-hosted Grafana from 12.x to 13: React 19 plugin readiness, unified storage migration for dashboards and folders and why rollback needs a backup, removed grafana-cli and grafana-server commands, disabled id-based data source APIs and the Git Sync migration bug in 13.0.0.
Upgrading from Grafana 10.4 to 11: AngularJS panels and data sources switched off, legacy alerting removed so Grafana will not start with it enabled, anonymous users billed in Enterprise, and the subfolder routing issue to check first.
Upgrading to Grafana 10: RBAC always on, case-insensitive usernames and emails that can cause identity conflicts on non-MySQL databases, the cleanup needed after a downgrade and re-upgrade, and removed dashboard previews.
Moving through Grafana 12.x minor releases: deprecated plugin install variables, the alerting metric prefix change in 12.4 that breaks dashboards and alerts on cluster health, and the support window for each minor.
Auditing installed panels and data sources before a major upgrade: Angular plugins that stop loading, updating plugins with the CLI after the upgrade, and replacing abandoned community plugins.
Upgrading Grafana on Kubernetes through the community-maintained Helm chart: the grafana-community repository, persistence that is off by default, plugin values and the database backup to take before helm upgrade.
Planning a way back before upgrading Grafana: backing up grafana.db or the MySQL or PostgreSQL database, configuration and plugins, and the known traps when downgrading across RBAC and secrets encryption changes.
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