Look around Grafana on Grafana Labs

Tour Grafana Cloud

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:59:53 -0500

Tour Grafana Cloud

You don’t need your own data to tour Grafana Cloud. Maybe yours is still arriving, you don’t have access yet, or you’d rather look around before connecting anything. Grafana Play is a public Grafana site already filled with data, so you can see everything working right now.

No install
No account
Nothing touches your systems

Grafana Cloud can do far more than one journey can show, so this section walks through a few of its features, one at a time. For each one, you’ll see what it is, why it matters, and watch it working.

Dashboards

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Dashboards

A dashboard is a single saved page that shows related information at a glance. Two parts make it work:

Panel: One view of your data, for example a chart, graph, or table. A dashboard is a set of one or more panels.
Time range: The window of time the panels are showing

When you change the time range, the panels on the page update to match it.

Why it matters

Someone builds a dashboard once, and everyone can use it from then on. When you want to know how a system is doing, you open its page and the answer is already laid out. You don’t need to build anything. If you can recognize a panel and the time range, you can read a dashboard someone else built.

See for yourself

The guide below walks you through the dashboard list, one open dashboard, its panels, the menu in each panel’s corner, and a time range you change yourself. It runs on Grafana Play, so you don’t need an account.

Use dashboards to check a system's health

Complete this interactive guide in the Grafana Play stack with an interactive learning experience.

Try in Grafana Play

Visualizations

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:59:53 -0500

Visualizations

A panel does two things. It runs a query to fetch data, and it displays the results.

Query: The request Grafana sends for the data a panel shows
Visualization: The way the panel displays what comes back

A chart is one visualization. Grafana has many more. A map plots data by location, a gauge shows how far a number is from its limit, and a heatmap shows where values cluster.

Why it matters

The shape of your data and the question you’re asking determine which visualization to use. As a chart, disk usage shows how fast the disk is filling. As a gauge, it shows how close to full the disk is right now. The data is the same, but each visualization answers a different question. When your own data arrives in Grafana Cloud, you pick the visualization that answers the question you’re asking.

See for yourself

A gallery dashboard on Grafana Play provides working examples of many visualizations, from maps to gauges to heatmaps. Walk through it, no account needed.

Use visualizations to make a signal obvious

Complete this interactive guide in the Grafana Play stack with an interactive learning experience.

Try in Grafana Play

Investigate without writing queries

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:59:53 -0500

Investigate without writing queries

Dashboards show what someone already thought to watch. When something new breaks, you need to find out what just changed, and no saved page covers it yet.

Drilldown is guided troubleshooting. You start from Metrics, Logs, Traces, or Profiles, then click filters to narrow down, without writing a query.

Metrics, logs, traces, and profiles

Drilldown has a section for each:

Metrics: Numbers recorded over time, for example CPU or request rate
Logs: Timestamped text records of what happened
Traces: A map of one request as it hops between services
Profiles: Function-level resource consumption, such as CPU and memory

The same problem often shows up in more than one of these. A slowdown might appear as a spike in the metrics, an error line in the logs, and one slow hop in the trace.

See for yourself

The guide below starts you in Metrics, has you click a filter, and shows the result narrowing. It runs on Grafana Play, where metrics are already available, so you don’t need an account.

To go deeper on investigating your own metrics and logs this way, refer to the Investigate metrics and logs with Drilldown journey.

Use Drilldown to investigate without a query

Complete this interactive guide in the Grafana Play stack with an interactive learning experience.

Try in Grafana Play

Query data directly

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Query data directly

When clicking filters isn’t specific enough, Explore is the page for working with your data directly. You pick a data source, which is a connection to a place that already holds your data, and write a query. You don’t need to build a dashboard first.

Why it matters

Not every question about your data is worth a permanent page. Explore gives you a place to answer the one-offs. You run a query, look at the result, adjust it, and run it again until you see what you need. If a query turns out to be worth keeping, you can build a dashboard around it later. For now, it’s enough to know the page exists.

See for yourself

The guide below shows you where Explore lives, the data source picker, and a query that comes back as a chart. It runs on Grafana Play, where Explore opens with a working query, so you don’t need an account.

Use Explore to query data without building a dashboard

Complete this interactive guide in the Grafana Play stack with an interactive learning experience.

Try in Grafana Play

Alerting

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:59:53 -0500

Alerting

Nobody monitors a dashboard all day. Grafana Alerting monitors it for you.

You define conditions about your data, called alert rules. When a rule detects a problem, a notification goes to the person or channel you chose.

Why it matters

Checking dashboards by hand works for one or two systems and stops working after that. There are too many pages to check, and problems don’t wait until you happen to look. Alert rules monitor around the clock, so when something goes wrong, you find out right away instead of whenever you next look.

See for yourself

The guide below shows you where rules are defined, the condition it monitors, and where its notifications go. It runs on Grafana Play, where the rules monitor Play’s own data, so you don’t need an account.

To build an alert rule of your own from start to finish, refer to the Introduction to Grafana Alerting journey.

Use alerts to catch problems before your users do

Complete this interactive guide in the Grafana Play stack with an interactive learning experience.

Try in Grafana Play

What you can do next

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:59:53 -0500

What you can do next

You picked a starting point, got data flowing, and looked around the features you’ll use to work with it. Everything else in Grafana Cloud builds on that foundation. When you need them, Grafana IRM puts alerts, on-call schedules, and incident timelines in one place, and Adaptive Telemetry trims the volume and cost of the data you send. Neither is a first step.

Pick your next journey

Most starting points have a journey that goes deeper:

Connected a data source? Take Introduction to data sources.
Installed an integration? Take Introduction to integrations.
Sent data from a collector? Take Send data from external collectors.
Instrumented an app? Take Introduction to tracing to get more from its traces.
Built a load test? Take Getting started with k6 performance testing.

To practice what you saw on Grafana Play, but with your own data, take Introduction to Grafana Alerting to build your first alert rule, or Investigate metrics and logs with Drilldown to run a full investigation.

Bookmark these

Cost management and billing: What Grafana Cloud bills for, and how to watch your usage
Work with demo data: Realistic data in your own stack, free to use
Quick start for telemetry signals: Goes deeper than the walkthroughs, including query languages
Grafana Play: The public demo site you toured, always there to experiment in
Community forums and Grafana Slack: Where Grafana users ask and answer questions