Grafana 11.6.0

[youzer-name]

I've been running Grafana 10.x for my Powerwall Dashboard for a while and decided today to upgrade to the latest version, which is 11.6.0. I wanted to post about a few issues that may need attention if the project ever wants to update to the current Grafana version:

1. The scaling of the power flow animation doesn't work. Initially, the animation didn't show up at all. With a little help from the Gemini chatbot I narrowed down the problem to the first part of the panel content:

<style>
div.powerDiv {
      width: 100%;
      height: 100%;
      overflow: hidden;
      background: url(public/img/load_big.gif) center center no-repeat;
    }

The panel isn't seeing a height value, so it ends up scaling the animation to zero, effectively hiding it. I was able to work around this by defining a height:

<style>
div.powerDiv {
      width: 100%;
      height: 300px;
      overflow: hidden;
      background: url(public/img/load_big.gif) center center no-repeat;
    }

Which gets the animation to appear and scale in some cases, but it doesn't scale to all window sizes. Someone with a deeper understanding of the css and javascript being used to scale the animation would have to look at it to get back to the original functionality.

2. Some of my custom panels that use an expression to add or subtract values were showing an error warning. I don't know if this affects any of the stock panels in the project's main dashboard. I am doing things like subtracting my car charging from my total home use to get the "non-EV Charging" House usage. The dashboard displays a triangle with an exclamation mark on any panels with the warning.

The data display correctly, but the error icon was annoying so I wanted to find a solution. The best I was able to do is an almost silly hack where you hide the expression with the error and add another expression where you show that expression multiplied x 1.

Here I've un-hidden the expression with the warning (the second one in the screenshot) to show the warning flag:

The panel is just subtracting "total_r - evcharging_r". Those two values come from other expressions, and are the Reduced sum of the home data and EV charging data respectively. Since they've already been reduced to a single value, all the pictured expression is doing is subtracting one number from another... there are no time-series issues to deal with. The math really can't get any simpler.
But Grafana still throws the warning saying "2 items dropped from union(s)".

So the workaround is to use $house_sum * 1 in the expression at the top and hide the expression at the bottom.

Other than that, I haven't seen any glaring issues with Grafana 11.6.0 yet.