Grafana 4.0 Beta Release

Grafana v4.0 Beta introduces a significant new feature: alerting, which elevates Grafana from a visualization tool to a critical monitoring solution. This feature allows users to configure alert rules using existing graph panels, with notifications sent via Slack, PagerDuty, Email, and Webhook when conditions are met, although only certain data sources like Graphite and Prometheus are supported currently. Other enhancements include an alert list panel for tracking alert history, ad-hoc filter variables for dynamic data filtering, and several UX improvements such as TV mode and kiosk mode for optimized display on wall-mounted screens. Additionally, Grafana v4.0 offers enhanced dashboard building with a more intuitive row menu and improved drag-and-drop functionality, alongside the introduction of new keyboard shortcuts for seamless navigation and panel management. The release ensures backward compatibility with previous versions, requiring no breaking changes, while users are advised to back up databases before upgrading and to update plugins via grafana-cli.