Removal of Drilldown Investigations in Grafana: What you need to know

Back in May, we introduced the public preview of Grafana Drilldown Investigations, a new feature intended to help Grafana OSS and Grafana Cloud users accelerate their incident response.

Now, as we head into the new year, we’ve made the difficult decision to deprecate this feature from OSS and deprovision it from Grafana Cloud. 

To be clear, your Drilldown apps (logs, metrics, traces, profiles) will not be affected, and neither will the classic Explore. Also, Drilldown Investigations should not be confused with Grafana Assistant Investigations, which remains available to all Grafana Cloud users.

Though this feature never became generally available, we want to be transparent about the decision. Below you’ll find the timeline, what changes, and strategies on how to preserve notes and links you’ve saved.

Background

Drilldown Investigations set out to give you one place to collect and correlate key findings from different signals—metrics, logs, traces, and profiles—so you could move faster during an incident or a tricky performance dive. 

Sounds great, right? In practice, however, adoption was low compared to our core Drilldown apps and dashboards, and the extra side panel/UI surface area added complexity without enough day‑to‑day payoff for most teams. 

Rather than take Investigations to GA, we’re making the hard call to deprecate it and re‑invest that energy where you spend the majority of your time: Drilldown apps, dashboards, and guided pivots between signals. (If you’re new to Drilldown and how it differs from classic Explore, here’s the background.)

What’s not changing

• Metrics Drilldown, Logs Drilldown, Traces Drilldown, and Profiles Drilldown remain. These are the queryless, point‑and‑click experiences many of you rely on daily. They’re still the fastest way to move from “something looks off” to the relevant service, pod, span, or profile.
• Classic Explore remains. If you prefer to type queries, that workflow isn’t going anywhere.

What’s changing (Grafana Cloud)

• The Drilldown Investigations app (the sidebar experience that lets you collect items across Drilldown apps, add notes/markdown, and view a timeline or time‑range comparisons) will be removed from Grafana Cloud. Existing “investigations” artifacts (your notes and item lists) will not be available after removal.

What’s changing (Grafana OSS)

• The Drilldown Investigations app plugin will be marked as deprecated in the Plugin Catalog and eventually removed, unavailable for future installation in OSS Grafana.

When it’s changing

• Week of January 5: Removal and decommissioning of Grafana Drilldown Investigations app
• Week of January 5: Removal of Grafana Drilldown Investigations documentation

What you should do now (migration options)

If you’re currently using the Drilldown Investigations app, you have several options going forward. And if you have any additional questions, please reach out to your Grafana Cloud account manager. If you’re using this feature in OSS, reach out in the Grafana community Slack. 

Convert an investigation into a dashboard

If an investigation captured the right panels and comments, create a dashboard from the investigation to preserve its structure in a standard dashboard. This is the best one‑click way to keep a living artifact your team can iterate on.

Copy notes and links you want to keep

Investigations were mostly pointers and markdown used to add context around your telemetry data. If you have stored any important information in a Grafana Drilldown Investigation, copy any commentary you care about into runbooks, tickets, or dashboards before the removal date. (Your underlying telemetry remains unchanged.)

Use Assistant Investigations, part of Grafana Assistant

Grafana Assistant Investigations is not a replacement for Drilldown Investigations; it’s a completely new feature that supports running investigations. 

This feature allows you to investigate incidents autonomously and asynchronously. And thanks to a tight integration with Grafana Assistant, our AI-powered chat bot, you can also take a number of follow-up actions (build a dashboard, create queries, create an alert, etc.).

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!