Grafana 3.1 Beta introduces features aimed at enhancing collaboration in monitoring by allowing users to easily share and discover dashboards through a new repository on Grafana.net. This release improves dashboard sharing by syncing time ranges and variable values with URLs, adding constant template variables, and supporting metrics about Grafana itself. The update includes an export and import feature that enhances dashboard portability and simplifies the import process by allowing dashboards to be imported directly from Grafana.net. Users can now upload dashboards to Grafana.net, making them publicly accessible after adding descriptions and screenshots. The release also introduces internal metrics support, improves logging formats, and removes Graphite PNG support from the Graph panel. The much-anticipated alerting feature is still in development and not included, but substantial progress is being made.