Grafana Labs showed off new releases of its eponymous visualization platform, an updated version of Loki, and introduced its distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector, Alloy, at its Amsterdam GrafanaCON this week. We spoke to the company's CTO, Tom Wilkie, about the updates and where the tech industry darling of the moment – AI – fits into everything.
However, the most notable improvement is the introduction of Explore Metrics, which assists in wading through the reams of data spat out by the observability platform. Where knowledge of PromQL – a functional query language for the Prometheus monitoring system – has been a prerequisite for the proverbial needle in the data haystack, Grafana Labs reckons that Explore Metrics will make things query-less. Almost.
With Explore Metrics, the intention is to move away from a traditional query builder model. Wilkie explained how Grafana had wrestled with the challenge of creating something that could dig into a sea of metrics without requiring technical knowledge of PromSQL. Wilkie says:"Loki was always designed to be: 'Home in on the thing you want, and then show me the logs' ... I think that whole experience really resonated with developers.