We are extremely excited to announce the beta release of the Unified Query Language (UQL). This language provides a new, more powerful way to query your telemetry data and power your charts in dashboards, alerts, and notebooks.
UQL is a textual query language that works across telemetry types and can be used consistently in the Lightstep UI, public APIs, and Terraform, all while offering more query expressibility than the Unified Query Builder (UQB).
UQL allows you to:
- Ask more questions of your telemetry data
- More operators and use cases than the UQB
- Adopt Observability-as-Code using UQL Keep track of your important dashboards and alerts through the Lightstep Terraform Provider using the succinct and consistent UQL to represent your queries
- Extend Lightstep support for APIs into your observability ecosystem UQL and the public APIs make it easier for you to build extensions/features to further enhance how you use Lightstep. For example, you can use the Lightstep Observability Datasource (a Grafana plugin) that uses UQL to query timeseries data stored in Lightstep within your existing Grafana instance
Examples of questions you can answer with UQL:
- Show me the top 10 customers by traffic volume
- Show me the http request volume offset by 1 week
- Show me the 2 hour delta for CPU
You can easily learn the syntax of UQL by converting existing queries in the UQB to UQL with the click of a button. 
Get started with our cheat sheet