A queryless experience for exploring metrics, logs, traces, and profiles: Introducing the Explore apps suite for Grafana

One of our biggest goals at Grafana Labs is, and always has been, to build observability solutions that are not only powerful, but are also accessible and easy to use. At the end of the day, we want to help everyone derive meaningful insights from their data, whether they’re a seasoned SRE or an app developer just starting out on their observability journey.

“We’re not just improving our tools,” said Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana Labs. “We are completely changing how DevOps teams and SREs interact with their systems and data, simplifying their everyday activities.”

In line with this effort, today at ObservabilityCON 2024 we announced the public previews of Explore Profiles and Explore Traces, the latest additions to our suite of Explore apps that help you quickly and easily extract insights from your data — without having to learn or use complex query languages.

The idea behind our Explore apps suite is to offer opinionated, intuitive, and queryless user experiences that let you answer questions quickly through simple, point-and-click interactions. No steep learning curves, and no fumbling to construct a query to find the data you need.

In addition to Explore Profiles and Explore Traces, the suite also includes Explore Logs and Explore Metrics, both of which are now generally available in Grafana OSS, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Cloud. Together, these apps extend a seamless user experience across all core pillars of observability.

“[I’ve only been using] Grafana for some months [and Explore Metrics] actually really helped me to understand which kinds of metrics are there, and how to go into specific detail, because I’m able to do it through the UI,” said Patrik Švikruha, DevOps Team Lead at Notino.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the Explore apps suite and how you can start using it today to quickly and easily uncover insights into observability data stored in your Grafana LGTM (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics) and Grafana Pyroscope stack.

The Explore apps suite: seamless visibility across metrics, logs, traces, and profiles

Explore Metrics

Explore Metrics enables you to browse Prometheus-compatible metrics via an intuitive and queryless experience. You can search and select a metric name and immediately see the optimal visualization type, whether your metric is a gauge, counter, or histogram. You can also review your selected metric broken down by each of its labels, which makes it easy to spot anomalies by namespace, cluster, or any other attribute. Additionally, you can see related metrics based on your selected metrics for a more comprehensive understanding of your environment.

Overall, Explore Metrics — which is now generally available in Grafana OSS, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Cloud, and can visualize time series data stored in Prometheus or any Prometheus-compatible time-series database — offers a fast and efficient way to narrow down the source of latency, errors, or other issues.

To learn more about Explore Metrics, check out our technical documentation.

Explore Logs

Explore Logs — also now generally available in Grafana OSS, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Cloud — offers a queryless experience for easily surfacing insights from logs stored in Grafana Loki, Grafana Cloud Logs, and Grafana Enterprise Logs.

You can spot troublesome services without running a single query, and quickly add filters with point-and-click interactions. Explore Logs generates visualizations of log volumes to let you easily detect anomalies or related changes across labels and over time. Patterns help you identify sources of signal or filter out sources of noise in your log line content, further accelerating your troubleshooting process. New for GA, Explore Logs also provides first-class support for exploring and leveraging insights from OpenTelemetry resource attributes.

Check out our technical docs to learn more about Explore Logs.

Explore Traces

With Explore Traces, it’s easier than ever to make sense of your tracing data so you can gain an overall better understanding of errors and latency issues within complex distributed systems.

One of the most significant features of the Explore Traces app is the comparison workflow, which helps users pinpoint the most problematic attributes in their slow or erroring traces. There’s no need to write queries or perform deep analysis. Instead, the workflow does the heavy lifting for you, promoting the most relevant attributes to the top of the page so you can quickly spot anomalies and identify root causes.

You can now:

• Use high-level Rate, Errors, and Duration (RED) metrics to both identify and hone in on performance issues
• Automatically compare sets of selected traces to identify anomalies
• Visualize related issues and monitor changes over time, all without the complexity of TraceQL

This streamlined, intuitive approach helps teams respond to performance issues faster, even if they don’t have deep expertise in query languages.

Explore Traces is now available in public preview in Grafana OSS, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Cloud, and can visualize trace data stored in Grafana Tempo, Grafana Enterprise Traces, or Grafana Cloud Traces. For more details, check out our documentation.

Explore Profiles

Profiling data helps developers identify which parts of a program consume the most resources, such as CPU time, memory, or I/O operations. Profiling, as a signal, is unique in the way that it allows users to either proactively or reactively address performance issues in a number of different areas. The main use cases we typically see are:

• Proactive: Cutting costs, addressing latency issues, or optimizing memory usage for applications
• Reactive: Resolving incidents with line-level accuracy or debugging active latency/memory issues

Explore Profiles provides an intuitive interface to specifically support these use cases. You get a holistic view of all of your services and how they’re functioning, but also the ability to drill down for more targeted root cause analysis.

Flame graphs help you visualize resource allocation and performance bottlenecks, and you even get suggested recommendations and performance fixes via AI-driven flame graph analysis, as well as line-level insights from our GitHub integration.

Explore Profiles is now available in public preview in Grafana OSS, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Cloud, and can visualize profiling data stored in Grafana Pyroscope or Grafana Cloud Profiles. For more information, reference our technical docs.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with continuous profiling, metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!