Grafana 11: No Need to Create PromQL Queries for Prometheus
AMSTERDAM — Improving the developer experience is at the heart of Grafana 11’s release. Among the standout features described during GrafanaCON 2024 here, Grafana Labs’ annual user’s conference, is the Explore Metrics. With it, a major pain point has been removed — you’re now able to form queries and even look at problems in Prometheus specifically without having to write or learn Prometheus query language PromQL.
The user can find and select a metric name and immediately see the appropriate visualization, whether your metric is a gauge, counter or histogram, Grafana Labs said. The user can review the metric broken down by each of its labels, which makes it easy to spot anomalies by namespace, cluster, or any other attribute.
Additionally, there’s also a more accessible and user-friendly way of authoring Prometheus rules for event monitoring and alerting within Grafana with Grafana 11. This means you don’t have to dive deep into PromQL files or other configuration settings; instead, you can do it right in Grafana itself, which makes it much easier for users who might not be familiar with the inner workings of Kubernetes Prometheus.
Furthermore, Grafana 11’s release also brings improvements in terms of data source management. Now, users have more control and visibility over the data sources they are using, allowing for easier management and troubleshooting when issues arise.
@grafana’s @Kuqd on Explore Logs, includes @nginx search. #GrafanaCon 2024 pic.twitter.com/Ghg99euo0X
— BC Gain (@bcamerongain) April 9, 2024
Overall, these enhancements in Grafana’s user experience and development capabilities mark significant strides in making monitoring and visualization more accessible and efficient for users across different skill levels.
At GrafanaCon, Grafana said using Explore Metrics, you can find or select a metric name and immediately see the appropriate visualization, whether your metric is a gauge, counter, or histogram. You can review your metric broken down by each of its labels, which makes it easy to spot anomalies by namespace, cluster, or any other attribute. This is an efficient way to narrow down the source of latency, errors, or other issues — and it’s entirely point-and-click.
The idea is to make Prometheus queries simpler for developers and users, Tom Wilkie, CTO for Grafana Labs, told The New Stack. “I consider myself relatively an expert PromQL and I find it quicker and easier to use the Metrics Explorer than to write queries for the metrics with PromQL,” Wilkie said. “It must appeal to experts, as well as beginners.”
These are the kind of improvements admins and backend developers who manage data and data visualization for users at scale demand and expect from Grafana’s evolution. Robert Hamnett, IT Service Administrator for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), is instrumental in maintaining NEON’s environmental monitoring network, consisting of 47 terrestrial and 34 aquatic field sites across the United States. Sensors are used to collect 23,000 data streams from 3,500 data loggers generating 5 billion data points per day. Hammett’s technicians who must sometimes climb towers or traverse rough terrain don’t have the time to draft and run a PromQL query or perform other tasks that require knowledge of how Grafana works. They, more often than not, just want to use Grafana’s panel to pinpoint a problem that needs to be fixed in the field.
“We’re trying to design the UI to facilitate the task and we as admins want to facilitate navigation for the users to point them to where their problems are,” Hammett said. “Grafana is getting better and better for that.”
Nested subfolders are particularly useful to NEON, Hammett said. “In fact, the reason why we didn’t even use folders in the first place was that there wasn’t the ability to have nested subfolders,” Hammett said. “The way that we designed it is if you were looking at our dashboard list,” it’s immediately accessible.
Other new Grafana features the company communicated include flowcharting features:
- Widely used elements such as cloud, parallelogram, and triangle.
- Midpoint controls so that the connectors no longer have to be straight lines.
- More connector styles, including dashed lines as well as corner radius and direction control.
- Horizontal and vertical snapping for connectors.
- Rounded corner styling for elements.
- The ability to rotate elements on the canvas.
Grafana 11 also offers AI-powered titles and descriptions. With it, an AI-powered tool automatically summarizes the information in your panels and dashboards and creates detailed titles and descriptions for your dashboards, Grafana said.