Explore documentation
  1. Welcome to Logs 👋
  2. Quick start guide
  3. Logs sources
    1. Programming languages
    2. Cloud platforms
    3. Web servers & Load balancers
    4. Operating systems
    5. Databases & Message queues
    6. Containers & Clusters
    7. Logging & Monitoring tools
    8. HTTP REST API
  4. Log Forwarding
    1. Vector (Recommended)
    2. Fluent Bit
    3. Logstash
    4. Fluentd
    5. Filebeat
    6. Syslog
  5. Dashboards
    1. SQL queries
    2. Query variables
    3. Transforming with JavaScript
    4. Alerts
  6. API
    1. Get started with Logs API
    2. Sources API
    3. Query API
  7. Using Logs
    1. AWS S3-compatible archive
    2. String + JSON format
    3. Formatting logs
    4. Live tail query language
    5. Explore logs with SQL
    6. Querying data in Better Stack
      1. Shutting down Grafana

Shutting down Grafana

After deprecating the built-in Grafana in September 2023, we’ll be shutting it down in February 2024 in favor of the new collaborative dashboards.

Your existing Grafana queries will be automatically migrated to the new Explore logs section.

We’ll also be deprecating the original Logtail alerts in favor of the more sophisticated Dashboard alerts. 

Why are we doing this?

Querying logs with Grafana allowed us to quickly prototype a ClickHouse-backed dashboarding experience in the early days of Better Stack. As Better Stack matured, however, the Grafana interface proved extremely limiting in providing a cohesive user experience. We wanted you to be able to easily switch between filtering logs and analyzing metrics and the only way to make it happen was to design a custom charting from the ground up: the new collaborative dashboards.

Moreover, creating dashboards directly on top of structured logs required us to parse structured JSON during query time. While flexible, this approach is extremely CPU-intensive and doesn’t scale to large datasets fast enough.

Hence, we introduced Logs-to-metrics a few months back, a new, convenient way of automatically generating metrics out of your logs. Built on a brand new infrastructure, leveraging the ClickHouse -State & -Merge combinators, and backed by fast NVMe drives, the new metrics infrastructure provides virtually limitless scaling and impressively fast querying speed while maintaining flexibility. 

Moving forward

Deprecating Grafana will allow us to further focus on building unbeatable dashboards for software engineers.

The new dashboards already provide a superior experience to Grafana. As an example, please give the built-in anomaly detection a shot if you haven’t tried it yet: we’re confident you’re going to love it.

Get to know the new dashboards

Please read our guide on querying metrics and defining custom logs-to-metrics.

Need help? 

Please let us know your thoughts at hello@betterstack.com. We’re here to help!

Thank you for being our long-time customer. Your product feedback is invaluable, and it shapes Better Stack in moving forward.

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