Contextual, in-product guidance for every Grafana user: A closer look at Interactive Learning

As developer advocates at Grafana Labs, we’re always looking for new ways to help our users better understand and learn observability. You might remember our previous project that brought learning to life through an adventure-style game, and now we’re really excited to share something else we’ve been working on: Interactive Learning, a new way to get the technical help you need directly in Grafana.

If you’ve ever been deep in a dashboard or configuring a data source and hit a wall, you know how frustrating it can be to stop what you’re doing, open a browser tab, and hunt through documentation to find the answer you need. While those docs are great and go into a ton of detail, they also live outside Grafana. 

With Interactive Learning, we bring helpful and contextual learning resources into the Grafana platform itself, so you can find what you’re looking for quickly and easily — no context switching required.

Why we built Interactive Learning

Our goal was simple: make help available where it’s needed most. Instead of sending you away from your workflow in Grafana, we wanted to bring the right information to you.

That idea turned into something much bigger once we realized what was possible. Because we can render help text right inside Grafana itself, we suddenly had access to Grafana’s full runtime and Document Object Model (or DOM, which is the structure of the user interface itself). That meant help didn’t have to be static; it could be dynamic, contextual, and even interactive.

Getting started with Interactive Learning

Interactive Learning became available in public preview in all editions of Grafana as part of the Grafana 12.3 release. You can enable it by using the interactiveLearning feature flag, or install it directly from the plugin catalog by searching for Interactive Learning.

You’ll then find the new Interactive Learning experience by clicking the question mark icon in the top-right corner of Grafana.

That’s the same help button that’s always been there. Before Interactive Learning, it just provided a few links to places like our documentation or the Community Forum. Now, it opens a side panel that brings you contextual help, in-product documentation, and even guided learning journeys, all without leaving Grafana.

What Interactive Learning does

When you open the side panel, what you see depends on where you are in Grafana; the content is completely context-aware. Whether you’re viewing a dashboard, editing a data source, or creating a visualization, Grafana will surface documentation and learning material that’s relevant to what you’re doing right then and there.

And this isn’t just static text. You’re seeing the full documentation rendered directly in Grafana, complete with images, videos, and step-by-step examples. No more jumping between tabs or trying to remember what you just read.

Interactive learning guides

We’ve also introduced a new type of learning content: interactive learning guides. These are built right into the documentation and guide you through tasks, step by step, from within the Grafana UI.

Each guide breaks things down into easy, specific steps, and some steps also include a Show Me and/or a Do It function. Show Me highlights the relevant UI element and adds extra context.

The Do It function performs an action for you, such as clicking a button or filling out a field.

You can also run entire interactive sections at once to watch the full flow unfold.

If you want to see an interactive learning guide in action, try the Prometheus 101 tutorial, which walks you through setting up your first Prometheus data source and dashboard in Grafana.

Smarter, context-aware help

Interactive Learning is powered by two components: a frontend plugin and a service we call the recommender. The recommender is context-aware and will surface help and interactive learning guides with the highest likelihood of relevance to you and what you’re working on in Grafana.

By default, Interactive Learning runs entirely in offline mode, which means it still provides great, context-based help without sending any data externally. If you choose to enable the recommender service, Grafana can deliver even more tailored documentation and tutorials to match your current task, all while respecting your privacy.

What’s next for Interactive Learning

This is just the beginning. We’re already exploring a few exciting directions to take this feature next:

• Custom interactive guides: This would enable you to create your own interactive guides inside Grafana for onboarding new teammates or walking through internal workflows. If this is something you or your team would find valuable, we’d love to hear from you on our Community Slack or Community Forum.
• Integration with Grafana Assistant: We’re exploring ways to combine the capabilities of Grafana Assistant, our AI-powered agent in Grafana Cloud, with guided learning to make it even easier to explore and understand your data.

• Workshop mode: This would serve as a live session where a presenter can guide participants through Grafana, step by step. Great for team onboarding, internal training, or community workshops.

Try Interactive Learning today

A great way to get started is to try the new Interactive Learning experience in Grafana Play, our sandbox environment for testing and learning Grafana, hosted on Grafana Cloud. Interactive Learning is enabled by default in Play, and comes with an introductory interactive learning guide that walks you through all that Play has to offer. 

Or, if you’re ready to dive right in and start using this feature in your own Grafana instance, please follow the instructions in the Getting started with Interactive Learning section above.

Lastly, like Grafana itself, the Interactive Learning plugin is open source. This feature has been shaped by community input from day one, and we’re happy to accept contributions, whether that’s general feedback or ideas for improvements. We can’t wait to see where Interactive Learning goes next. 

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