Grafana Labs, creators of the Grafana open-source metrics analytics and visualization suite, has announced the preview release of Grafana 11 with improvements to make it easier to view metrics, and changes to the dashboard.

Grafana offers a robust time-series database. It was created as a fork of Elastic's Kibana (ElasticSearch’s analytics and visualization platform)  to add support for monitoring metrics that was lacking at that point in Kibana. 

A major change to Grafana 11 is the addition of an Explore Metrics tool. This gives users a way to browse Prometheus-compatible metrics without the need to write queries in PromQL. The tool can be used to slice and dice metrics based on their labels, so users can see anomalies right away. The tool also lets you choose visualizations for metrics based on its type such as a gauge versus a counter. There's an option to view other metrics that are relevant to the current metric, and another choice lets you "explore in a drawer" - expand a drawer over a dashboard with more content, so you don't lose your place.

A related addition is an Explore Logs tool. This is a queryless experience for exploring Loki logs without needing to write LogQL. The primary interaction modes are point-and-click based on log volume, similar to Explore Metrics.

The tool lets users view log volume and log line samples when first opening Explore Logs, and to explore additional labels and detected fields in a similar way, focusing on volume and distribution; add them to your "query" to refine your logs search without needing LogQL.  Explore Logs is open source, and experimental.

The Dashboards feature has been updated and moved to the Scenes library. The developers say this offers more stable, dynamic, and flexible dashboards. In practical terms, there's a new edit mode that offers an easier way to discover and interact with the dashboard edit experience. Another improvement is the moving of template variables and the time picker, which both now stick to the top as you scroll through your dashboard. The team says that this has historically been a very requested feature that they are very happy to be able to finally roll out.

Other improvements include better flowcharting, and the option to use AI to generate titles and descriptions for panels and dashboards.

Grafana 11 is available in preview now. 

More Information

Grafana Website

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