Dashboards in Grafana
Dashboards show persistent visualizations of your observability data. Use them to monitor system health and key metrics, and to share views with your team.
Viewing dashboards
- Click Dashboards in the left sidebar
- Browse available dashboards or use search
- Click a dashboard to open it
Creating dashboards
To create a new dashboard:
- Click Dashboards → New → New Dashboard
- Add panels using Add visualization
- Configure each panel with queries and visualization settings
- Save the dashboard with a descriptive name
Panel types
Common panel types for observability:
| Panel | Best for |
|---|---|
| Time series | Metrics over time |
| Stat | Single values (current error rate, uptime) |
| Table | Log entries, detailed data |
| Logs | Log streams |
Dashboard best practices
Auto-refresh warning
Dashboard panels refresh automatically, so expensive queries (especially log queries over large time ranges) can impact performance. Use metrics for frequently-refreshing panels, and reserve log queries for focused investigations.
- Use variables to make dashboards reusable across namespaces or environments
- Set appropriate refresh intervals based on query cost
Learn more
For detailed dashboard creation guides, see the Grafana dashboard documentation.