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Version: Develop

Migrate From Grafana 5.4 to Grafana 8.3

Migrate From Grafana 5.4 to Grafana 8.3​

a9s has recently updated the Grafana version in a9s Prometheus from v5.4 to v8.3. While no action is required for the dashboards, manual steps are required for the alerting system in Grafana.

Grafana 8 introduced a new alerting system called Unified Alerting. The transition from Legacy to Unified Alerting requires some adjustments regarding notification. In Legacy Alerting, each alert was based on a specific graph from a specific dashboard, and notifications for triggered alerts were sent through notification channels.

With unified alerting, alerts are now independent from graphs on dashboards. Notification channels are gone and have been replaced with a notification policy based notification system.

We recommend taking a look at the official Grafana documentation.

When you upgrade an existing a9s Prometheus Service instance, here's what happens to the configuration in Grafana.

  • The dashboards will be migrated. This should work without any issues as the new Grafana version is backward compatible and Grafana will update the dashboard json to the new format.
  • The alerts will be migrated from Grafana Alerts into unified alerting. So the old alerts should still be available. We recommend that you review the alerts carefully.
  • Notification Channels will be converted to Contact Points. Again, we recommend checking these carefully.
  • Since Legacy Alerting does not know any Notification Policies, only a general Notification Policy is created. Here you should define new Notification Policies that meet your needs. We do not recommend using the automatically created ones.