What you will learn
- Build useful dashboards
- Avoid dashboard sprawl
- Highlight what matters
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The basics, in plain English
A dashboard is a screen full of charts that shows the health of your system at a glance. Grafana is a popular free tool for building these dashboards by pulling in your metrics and drawing graphs. Good dashboards turn piles of numbers into pictures anyone can read.
- Dashboard
- A single screen of charts summarizing how your system is doing.
- Grafana
- A popular open-source tool for building and viewing dashboards.
- Panel
- One chart or widget on a dashboard showing a single thing.
- Data source
- Where the dashboard pulls its numbers from, like Prometheus.
- Visualization
- Turning numbers into a graph, gauge, or table that is easy to read.
- At a glance
- The goal of a dashboard: understand health in a few seconds.
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Less is more
A good dashboard answers a question at a glance. Grafana visualizes Prometheus and Loki data. Resist adding every metric.
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