Grafana dashboards are now powered by Scenes: big changes, same UI

Grafana has significantly upgraded its dashboard architecture by migrating to the Grafana Scenes library, which provides a more stable, dynamic, and flexible backend while maintaining the same user interface. This change was necessitated by the limitations of their decade-old codebase, which hindered the implementation of user-requested features such as multiple time ranges and nested variable scopes. The new architecture, built on the Scenes library, offers an intuitive API for developers and aims to simplify complexity by managing dashboards as a tree structure, improving internal workflows and allowing for more efficient data handling. The migration process, which prioritized feature parity to avoid disrupting the user experience, has resulted in faster PDF exports, fixed bugs, and minor UI improvements like a fixed-position time picker and new Edit mode, while also laying the groundwork for future enhancements such as dashboard tabs and interactive metrics comparison. The updated architecture has already been rolled out to the majority of Grafana Cloud users, with plans for further features and improvements in the near future.