Exploring a metric through the Metrics Explorer

In IBM Cloud Logs, you can use the metrics explorer to investigate metric behavior, compare series across labels, and surface outliers across your entire label space from a single screen. You can query any Prometheus-compatible metric, visualize the results, and drill down by label dimensions without setting up a dashboard first.

You can browse, search and filter metric time series by name and labels, generate PromQL queries of selected metric time series and create ad-hoc visualizations of selected metric time series and PromQL queries.

Use cases

Use Metric Explorer to:

  • Query without a dashboard: Build and run PromQL queries in a dedicated workspace, using a no-code builder or a code editor.
  • Visualize and compare: See metric trends as time series charts, filter by labels, apply aggregations, and combine expressions to derive new signals.
  • Find what's driving anomalies: Drill down by label dimensions to identify which label values are contributing to unusual behavior, without writing additional queries.

Launching the Metrics Explorer

Complete the following steps to launch the Metrics Explorer:

  1. Navigate to your IBM Cloud Logs instance: Observability > Logging > Cloud Logs > Your Service Instance > Open Dashboard.

  2. Select Explore Logs > Visual Explorer.

    Visual Explorer
    Visual Explorer

  3. Select Query #1 > Open Metric Explorer

    Metric Explorer
    Metric Explorer

The Metric Explorer opens.

Explore metric labels and values

Before running a query, you can use the Metric Explorer section to find metrics that are available, their labels, and label values that you can use to generate a starting PromQL query without prior knowledge of the metric structure.

Metric Explorer section
Metric Explorer section

Get insights on a metric

In the Metric Analysis section, you can explore any metric listed in the Metric Explorer section.

You can get the following information:

  • Trend: A trend line showing the shape of each series over the selected period.
  • Label columns: The label dimensions that differentiate each series.
  • Last value: The most recent recorded value for the series.

Choose a metric in the Metric Explorer section to display results in the Query over time chart and a table.

Choose a metric
Choose a metric

The chart shows each series as a color-coded line.

  • Hover over the graph to see the exact values for each series at that moment.
  • Use the legend to identify or toggle individual series.

Hover over the graph
Hover over the graph

You can select a column header to sort the data in the column.

Use Search series to filter rows by label value.

You can interact with the table and chart by hovering or selecting a row in the table, which highlights the corresponding series in the chart.

Next

After you analyze a metric, you can click Apply query and return to visual explorer to reuse the metric query in a dashboard.