Grafana version 4.1, released shortly after version 4.0, incorporates significant improvements largely contributed by the community through pull requests. Key updates include the introduction of shared tooltips across all graphs, integrations with VictorOps and OpsGenie for notifications, enhanced Cloudwatch configuration allowing direct input of access keys in the data source settings, and added support for Elasticsearch 5.x, while discontinuing support for Elasticsearch 1.x. Users can now also add Markdown-formatted help text to panels, enhancing usability. The release, largely free of breaking changes apart from the Elasticsearch update, highlights the collaborative efforts of the Grafana community.