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Grafana's dashboard UI is all about building dashboards for visualization. **Explore** strips away all the dashboard and panel options so that you can focus on the query and metric exploration. Iterate until you have a working query and then think about building a dashboard. You can also jump from a dashboard panel into **Explore** and from there do some ad-hoc query exploration with the panel queries as a starting point.
For infrastructure monitoring and incident response, you no longer need to switch to other tools to debug what went wrong. **Explore** allows you to dig deeper into your metrics and logs to find the cause. Grafana's new logging data source, [Loki](https://github.com/grafana/loki) is tightly integrated into Explore and allows you to correlate metrics and logs by viewing them side-by-side.
Explore features a new [Prometheus query editor](/explore/#prometheus-specific-features). This new editor has improved autocomplete, metric tree selector,
The log exploration and visualization features in Explore are available to any data source but are currently only implemented by the new open source log
Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective, as it does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream. The logs from Loki are queried in a similar way to querying with label selectors in Prometheus. It uses labels to group log streams which can be made to match up with your Prometheus labels.
For more information about Grafana Loki, refer to [Github Grafana Loki](https://github.com/grafana/loki) or [Grafana Labs hosted Loki](https://grafana.com/loki).
Built-in support for [Google Stackdriver](https://cloud.google.com/stackdriver/) is officially released in Grafana 6.0. Beta support was added in Grafana 5.3 and we have added lots of improvements since then.
One of the goals of the Grafana v6.0 release is to add support for the three major clouds. Amazon CloudWatch has been a core data source for years and Google Stackdriver is also now supported. We developed an external plugin for Azure Monitor last year and for this release the [plugin](https://grafana.com/plugins/grafana-azure-monitor-datasource) is being moved into Grafana to be one of the built-in data sources. For users of the external plugin, Grafana will automatically start using the built-in version. As a core data source, the Azure Monitor data source is able to get alerting support, in the 6.0 release alerting is supported for the Azure Monitor service, with the rest to follow.
The Azure Monitor data source integrates four Azure services with Grafana - Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Application Insights and Azure Application Insights Analytics.
Please read [Using Azure Monitor in Grafana documentation]({{< relref "../datasources/azuremonitor/" >}}) for more detailed information on how to get started and use it.
Grafana now has support for provisioning alert notifiers from configuration files, allowing operators to provision notifiers without using the UI or the API. A new field called `uid` has been introduced which is a string identifier that the administrator can set themselves. This is the same kind of identifier used for dashboards since v5.0. This feature makes it possible to use the same notifier configuration in multiple environments and refer to notifiers in dashboard json by a string identifier instead of the numeric id which depends on insert order and how many notifiers exist in the instance.
Grafana 6.0 removes the need to configure and set up additional storage for [user sessions](/tutorials/ha_setup/#user-sessions). This should make it easier to deploy and operate Grafana in a
high availability setup and/or if you're using a stateless user session store like Redis, Memcache, Postgres or MySQL.
Instead of user sessions, we've implemented a solution based on short-lived tokens that are rotated frequently. This also replaces the old "remember me cookie"
solution, which allowed a user to be logged in between browser sessions and which have been subject to several security holes throughout the years.
For more information about the short-lived token solution and how to configure it, refer to [short lived token](/auth/overview/#login-and-short-lived-tokens).
Besides these changes we have also made security improvements regarding Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities:
- The ElasticSearch data source now supports [bucket script pipeline aggregations](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-aggregations-pipeline-bucket-script-aggregation.html). This gives the ability to do per-bucket computations like the difference or ratio between two metrics.
Check out the [CHANGELOG.md](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md) file for a complete list of new features, changes, and bug fixes.
