Grafana Play updates: A redesigned homepage to celebrate our community

Grafana Play is a free, publicly accessible sandbox environment where anyone can explore and learn about Grafana, no setup or sign-in required. It comes preloaded with sample dashboards demonstrating how to connect to data sources, build visualizations, and experiment with Grafana’s advanced features.

Hosted on Grafana Cloud, Grafana Play has grown significantly over the years. With thousands of public dashboards, it’s now a go-to destination for Grafana learning and exploration. And today, we’re excited to share that Grafana Play has a whole new look and feel.

In this blog post, we’ll share why we recently redesigned the Grafana Play homepage, walk you through the updated design, and explore how these updates make Grafana Play an even more fun and welcoming place to explore Grafana.

Why we redesigned the homepage

As Grafana Play evolved, and our community grew along with it, we wanted to redesign the homepage to better reflect that energy. Our overall goal was to make it more community-driven, more welcoming, and, of course, more playful. The new homepage celebrates our contributors, highlights creative dashboards, and makes discovering Grafana’s key features easier than ever.

Our previous homepage, shown below, helped users get started, but didn’t fully capture how dynamic and community-driven Grafana Play has become.

We wanted a design that better reflects our commitment to the community and makes it even more fun to explore Grafana.

What’s new in the Grafana Play homepage 

By using existing visualization plugins such as Business Text Panel, News, and Video, the new Grafana Play homepage is designed to put the community front and center.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the homepage panels.

A new header panel for community links

The new header panel makes it easier to connect with others in the Grafana ecosystem. From forums and documentation to learning journeys and upcoming community events, the header now provides direct links to key areas where Grafana users share ideas and get help, and makes it even easier to access and sign up for Grafana Cloud.

Featured Grafana Contributor

Grafana thrives on community contributions, both internal and external, and we want to celebrate that. 

The new Featured Grafana Contributor panel highlights individuals who’ve shared dashboards, plugins, created educational content, or shared other insights that inspire others. This is our small way of acknowledging the big impact of our global community.

Interested in becoming a featured Grafana contributor? Please reach out in the #grafana-play channel in the Grafana Community Slack. 

Dashboard of the Month

Every month, we’ll spotlight a dashboard that showcases creative, insightful, or unexpected uses of Grafana. It’s a great way to explore new techniques and get inspired by what others are building.

Play Launchpad

The new Play Launchpad is your one-stop hub for exploring Grafana visualization and data source examples, along with some of the core capabilities in Grafana Cloud.

We created the launchpad using a grid dashboard layout, achieved with the Business Text Panel plugin and some basic HTML and CSS. Here’s a closer look at the highlights:

Grafana Arcade: Embracing the playful side of our popular sandbox environment, we’ve introduced Grafana Arcade, a collection of interactive games to learn the ins and outs of Grafana — and have a little fun while you’re at it.

Featured Dashboards: Need a little inspiration for that new dashboard you’re building? Check out the new Featured Dashboards section, where we spotlight some truly awesome dashboards that showcase the full power and flexibility of Grafana — whether that’s tracking meeting costs or public transportation in London.

We’re always looking for contributions, so if you’d like your dashboard featured, please reach out in the #grafana-play channel in our community Slack. 

Quick side note: Grafana Play does not have all data sources installed, so to ensure there are no data issues, we only accept dashboard contributions using the Infinity data source plugin.

What’s next

By spotlighting community contributions and streamlining access to Grafana features, the redesigned Grafana Play homepage encourages everyone, whether a beginner or an observability pro, to explore, share, and play.

We’ll continue to iterate on the new design. We plan to add a full demo of the Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics) from the Play Launchpad, making it easy to get hands-on with the full observability stack. 

We hope you’ll head over to the new Grafana Play homepage to explore the updates and let us know what you think. We encourage you to provide feedback in the #grafana-play channel within the Grafana Community Slack.

Thank you for being a part of the Grafana Play community!