Grafana 11 Released: Query-less Explore Metrics and Logs

What happened

Grafana 11.0.0 was released on May 14, 2024, according to the official GitHub release. Grafana Labs described it as containing major improvements, most notably the ability to explore Prometheus metrics and Loki logs without writing any query language.

Explore Metrics and Logs

The headline features were Explore Metrics and Explore Logs. Explore Metrics is a query-less experience for browsing Prometheus-compatible metrics, letting users search or filter for a metric, slice it by labels, and see the right visualization for its type without learning PromQL. Explore Logs brought the same point-and-click, volume-based exploration to Loki logs, so users no longer needed to write LogQL to investigate their logs.

Scenes-powered dashboards

Grafana 11 migrated dashboards to the Scenes library, providing more stable, dynamic and flexible dashboards. This introduced an edit mode that makes the dashboard editing experience easier to discover and interact with, and fixed positioning so the time picker, moved into the dashboard canvas, and template variables stick to the top as users scroll, a long-requested feature.

AI titles, subfolders and more

The release let users generate panel and dashboard titles and descriptions with generative AI via the Grafana LLM app plugin, and made subfolders generally available for organising dashboards and nesting permissions. It also improved the canvas visualization with new flowcharting elements and connector styles, added colored table rows with conditional formatting, and redesigned the alert rule detail view.

Why it mattered

Grafana 11 lowered the barrier to observability by removing the need to know PromQL or LogQL to explore metrics and logs, opening the platform to a wider audience. Combined with the Scenes migration and AI-assisted authoring, it modernised both how users query data and how they build dashboards.

Related on Skillo

See also: Grafana 10 and Correlations.

Sources

• Grafana 11.0.0 release (GitHub)
• What's new in Grafana v11.0 (Grafana Labs)

Published date reflects the original event date (2024-05-14). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.