In this post, we’ll highlight the latest updates to saved queries, a feature that lets teams share, discover, and reuse queries to get to trusted answers faster and help new teammates get up to speed. We’ll also explore how the new View panel sidebar makes exploring busy panels a breeze.
If you want to read about all the latest updates in Grafana 13.2, please refer to the changelog or our What’s New documentation.
Saved queries: reuse trusted queries across dashboards and teams
Good queries are hard-won. Writing one means knowing both the query language and your own data, like which of four similarly named metrics is the one you can trust. That knowledge usually sits with a few experienced people, or is gradually learned through exploration (increasingly AI-assisted), validation, and revision. Often teams end up rebuilding the same Grafana queries over and over, and the best ones live in pinned Slack messages or get copy-pasted from old dashboards. New team members feel it most, since their first weeks are often spent reverse-engineering existing dashboards just to work out how to ask a question of their own.
The query history in Grafana Explore helps, keeping a couple of weeks of your own queries and letting you “star” the keepers. It’s private to you, though. Until recently, there hasn’t been a built-in way to take a query you trust and put it somewhere your whole organization can find it.
How teams use saved queries
We built saved queries, which is now generally available in Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise, to address this challenge by providing a shared query library for your organization. When you write a query worth keeping, you can save it with a title, description, and tags. Saving works from dashboard panels, Explore, and annotation queries. This means teammates who don’t know PromQL or SQL can still build dashboards from queries that the experts already vetted.
