What's new in the Grafana Image Renderer: higher-quality results, security enhancements, and more

The Grafana Image Renderer, a backend service for rendering Grafana dashboards and panels as images, has undergone significant improvements with the release of version 5.0. This update enhances the service's performance, reliability, and security, including a rewrite of the service, better heuristics for higher-quality image rendering, and significant security enhancements for Grafana Cloud users. The new version has moved to a Go-based implementation, resulting in reduced memory usage and allowing for low-level security improvements, such as isolating the Chromium browser within a custom sandbox. The service now offers extensive configuration options, including rate-limiting based on available memory and acceptance tests to ensure changes do not disrupt functionality. The plugin version of the Image Renderer has been deprecated, requiring users to deploy it as a separate service. With these updates, Grafana Cloud users automatically receive the benefits, while self-managed environments must migrate to the new configuration to take advantage of the improvements.