Grafana v6.0 brings many new and exciting features and enhancements and at the same time includes a new React platform and architecture for panels & plugins that will fundamentally change Grafana’s future as a platform. Grafana’s dashboard UI is all about building dashboards for visualization. Explore strips away all the dashboard and panel options so that you can focus on the query & metric exploration.
Iterate until you have a working query and then think about building a dashboard. You can also jump from a dashboard panel into Explore and from there do some ad-hoc query exporation with the panel queries as a starting point. For infrastructure monitoring and incident response, you no longer need to switch to other tools to debug what went wrong.
Explore allows you to dig deeper into your metrics and logs to find the cause. Grafana’s new logging datasource, Loki is tightly integrated into Explore and allows you to correlate metrics and logs by viewing them side-by-side. Explore is a new paradigm for Grafana.
It creates a new interactive debugging workflow that integrates two pillars of observability – metrics and logs. Explore works with every datasource but for Prometheus we have customized the query editor and the experience to provide the best possible exploration UX.
Source: grafana.com