Grafana Series (IV): Grafana Explore
This article was last updated on: July 24, 2024 am
👉️URL: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/explore/
📝Description:
Explore Grafana’s dashboard UI is about building visual dashboards. Explore strips the dashboard and panel options so you can:
Grafana’s dashboard UI is about building visual dashboards. Explore strips the dashboard and dashboard options so you can focus on your queries. It helps you iterate until you have a valid query before thinking about building a dashboard.
If you just want to explore your data and don’t want to create a dashboard, then Explore can make it easier for you. If your data source supports both graphical and tabular data, Explore displays the results as both graphs and tables. This allows you to see trends and more details of your data at the same time. See also.
- Query management in Explore
- Log consolidation in Explore
- Tracing integration in Explore
- Inspector in Explore
Start browsing
In order to access “Explore”, you must have an Editor or Administrator role, unless enabled viewers_can_edit option。 Please refer to it Organization rolesto learn more about what each role can access.
To access Explore:
-
Click the Explore icon on the menu bar.
An empty “Explore” tab opens.
Alternatively, start with an existing query in the panel and select the Explore option from the panel menu. This opens an Explore tab with the query in the panel and allows you to adjust or iterate over the query outside of the dashboard.
- Select your data source from the drop-down menu at the top left.Prometheus There is a custom Explore implementation, and other data sources use its standard query editor.
- In the Query field, write your query to explore your data. There are three buttons next to the query field, a clear button (X), an add query (+) button, and a delete query button (-). Just like a normal query editor, you can add and remove multiple queries.
Split and compare
Split views provide an easy way to compare charts side by side, or view related data together on one page.
To open split view:
- Click the Split button to copy the current query and split the page into two side-by-side queries.
You can select another data source for a new query, for example, that allows you to compare the same query for two different servers, or compare staging and production environments.
In split view, the time selectors of both panels can be linked by clicking on one of the time sync buttons attached to the time selector (if you change one, the other will also be changed). Links to time selectors help keep the start and end times of split view queries in sync. It ensures that you see the same time interval in both split panels.
To close the newly created query, click the Close Split button.
Jump between Explore and Dashboard
To help speed up your workflow by switching frequently from Explore to dashboards and vice versa, Grafana gives you the ability to navigate back to the original dashboard after navigating to Explore from the panel’s drop-down menu.
After you navigate to Explore, you should notice a Back button in the Explore toolbar. Just click on it to return to the origin dashboard. To bring the changes you made while exploring back to the dashboard, click the arrow next to the button to see the menu item “Return to panel with changes”.
Note: Available in Grafana 7.3 and later.
The Share Short Link feature allows you to create smaller, simpler ones/goto/:uidformat instead of using long URLs with query parameters. To create a short link for an executed query, click the Share option in the Explore toolbar. A short link that has never been used will be automatically deleted after seven days.