A couple of years ago I wrote about your options for displaying status over time in Grafana 9, which discussed the problem of visualizing things how many (firing) Prometheus alerts there are of each type over time. Since then, some things have changed in the Grafana ecosystem, and especially some answers have recently become clearer to me (due to an old issue report), so I have some updates to that entry.

The generally best panel type you want to use for this is a state timeline panel, with 'merge equal consecutive values' turned on. State timelines are no longer 'beta' in Grafana 11 and they work for this, and I believe they're Grafana's more or less officially recommended solution for this problem. By default a state timeline panel will show all labels, but you can enable pagination. The good news (in some sense) is that Grafana is aware that people want a replacement for the old third party Discrete panel (1, 2, 3) and may at some point do more to move toward this.

You can also use bar graphs and line graphs, as mentioned back then, which continue to have the virtue that you can selectively turn on and off displaying the timelines of some alerts. Both bar graphs and line graphs continue to have their issues for this, although I think they're now different issues than they had in Grafana 9. In particular I think (stacked) line graphs are now clearly less usable and harder to read than stacked bar graphs, which is a pity because they used to work decently well apart from a few issues.

(I've been impressed, not in a good way, at how many different ways Grafana has found to make their new time series panel worse than the old graph panel in a succession of Grafana releases. All I can assume is that everyone using modern Grafana uses time series panels very differently than we do.)

As I found out, you don't want to use the status history panel for this. The status history panel isn't intended for this usage; it has limits on the number of results it can represent and it lacks the 'merge equal consecutive values' option. More broadly, Grafana is apparently moving toward merging all of the function of this panel into the Heatmap panel (also). If you do use the status history panel for anything, you want to set a general query limit on the number of results returned, and this limit is probably best set low (although how many points the panel will accept depends on its size in the browser, so life is fun here).

Since the status history panel is basically a variant of heatmaps, you don't really want to use heatmaps either. Using Heatmaps to visualize state over time in Grafana 11 continue to have the issues that I noted in Grafana 9, although some of them may be eliminated at some point in the future as the status history panel is moved further out. Today, if for some reason you have to choose between Heatmaps and Status History for this, I think you should use Status History with a query limit.

If we ever have to upgrade from our frozen Grafana version, I would expect to keep our line graph alert visualizations and replace our Discrete panel usage with State Timeline panels with pagination turned on.