Grafana is evolving from a general dashboarding tool into a comprehensive observability platform, with new features tailored for DevOps, as highlighted by Grafana Labs’ Director of UX, David Kaltschmidt, at the 2019 InfluxDays Conference. A notable feature is the Explore mode, introduced in Grafana version 6.0, which allows users to modify queries without altering dashboards, enhancing the troubleshooting process for engineers. This mode supports visualizing both metrics and logs from Influx, a time series database that uniquely stores both numeric and string values. The integration of log aggregation is essential as it allows engineers to investigate alerts through centralized log storage, preventing data loss if machines fail. InfluxDB's capability to tag and label logs facilitates the isolation and filtering of relevant data, optimizing the troubleshooting process. Logs can be ingested into Influx via its API, Telegraf plugins, or Fluentd, while Grafana's Explore mode further enhances log data exploration with features like tag-based filtering and split view for side-by-side metrics and logs analysis. Future developments aim to unify the Influx and Flux datasources, simplifying the user experience, as Grafana continues to focus on log aggregation as a core aspect of its observability strategy.