Introducing Learning journeys: New step-by-step guides to get started with Grafana

Our Big Tent philosophy provides the foundation for our broad, modular, and flexible observability platform. With Grafana’s powerful ability to integrate with a wide range of data sources, tools, and plugins, you can create customized solutions tailored to your unique needs. 

Our documentation reflects this flexibility, providing resources that explain the range of our products, the extensibility of our platform, the diversity of data sources available, and the many customizations Grafana supports—all while encouraging collaboration.

This flexibility, however, sometimes introduces complexity for new users and can present challenges in providing comprehensive documentation for every potential use case. 

The mission of the technical writing team at Grafana Labs is straightforward: to help users become successful with Grafana Labs’ observability tools through clear, effective technical documentation. It’s a simple mission, but one with an expansive scope. Our products, projects, and features are highly dynamic, and maintaining documentation that doesn’t quickly become outdated or inaccurate requires constant vigilance.

Thankfully, we’ve got the process down: our Writers’ Toolkit and collaboration with engineers, developer advocates, and a broad network of contributors allow us to consistently produce reliable, high-quality documentation. We’ve also introduced Grot guides, which are interactive decision guides that are built to help the community map their requirements to the appropriate documentation through a series of questions. So far these tools and systems work well—and work continuously.

But like Alexander Hamilton, we’re not satisfied.

We want to support our community better as you explore the power of Grafana Labs’ observability tools—understanding how they can be used together, identifying the best approaches to solving specific problems, and ensuring that the latest features are seamlessly woven into our content. Our goal is to help you achieve success quickly and effectively.

Introducing Learning journeys

Learning journeys are step-by-step guides that provide a clear, structured path to lead users from beginner concepts to advanced use cases. Each journey is curated to give users the right tools at the right time, ensuring a cohesive and engaging learning experience.

A natural extension of our documentation, Learning journeys build on the foundation of our technical content, weaving together the necessary tools and resources to enable success for specific use cases—whether setting up monitoring for Linux servers or establishing a private, secure connection between a Grafana Cloud instance and data sources secured within a private network.

This framework is comprehensive but not time-consuming, providing a mix of written and video content to help you navigate each task. We’ve simplified navigation and incorporated clear milestones so you will always know where you are in the process, enhancing engagement and providing the flexibility to pick up where you left off if the journey is interrupted.

If you run into an obstacle, we will offer contextual troubleshooting to help you along the way. And to help you budget your time accordingly, each journey is automatically updated to estimate how long you can expect to spend on each page. This ensures that the total reading time displayed remains accurate, even if the journey is updated over time.

Learning as code

At Grafana Labs, our products, projects, and features constantly evolve as we continue to improve the user experience and innovate. To keep pace with these changes, we maintain continuous documentation updates for all of our offerings. To support this, we operate in a docs-as-code environment, and to effectively develop Learning journeys, we’ve created a learning-as-code framework. This framework acknowledges the ever-evolving nature of our documentation, videos, and other resources and embraces that change, ensuring our learning content remains relevant and up-to-date.

The framework is built to be flexible and scalable, ready to support future projects and expansions. By ensuring that it adapts to evolving source content, we create more engaging and effective learning experiences. As we continue to innovate and expand Grafana’s capabilities, our Learning journeys will stay current and aligned with the latest developments.

Looking ahead, we also plan to expand our Learning journeys to cover even more advanced use cases and integrate with new Grafana features.

Get involved with the Grafana community

Ready to get started? Visit our Learning journeys page to browse the available paths, choose the one that best fits your needs, and begin a learning journey today!

We believe that documentation is a community-driven effort. We’re just getting started with learning journeys, and we’re excited to build even more. We welcome all of your ideas and thoughts for new learning journeys or feedback on existing ones. At the end of the learning journey, you can suggest a new one. You can also send us an email at docs@grafana.com or contribute to our #docs channel on our Grafana Labs Community Slack.