Grafana Dashboards
Create and manage production-ready Grafana dashboards for comprehensive system observability.
Purpose
Design effective Grafana dashboards for monitoring applications, infrastructure, and business metrics.
When to Use
- Visualize Prometheus metrics
- Create custom dashboards
- Implement SLO dashboards
- Monitor infrastructure
- Track business KPIs
Dashboard Design Principles
1. Hierarchy of Information
2. RED Method (Services)
- Rate - Requests per second
- Errors - Error rate
- Duration - Latency/response time
3. USE Method (Resources)
- Utilization - % time resource is busy
- Saturation - Queue length/wait time
- Errors - Error count
Dashboard Structure
API Monitoring Dashboard
Panel Types
1. Stat Panel (Single Value)
2. Time Series Graph
3. Table Panel
4. Heatmap
Variables
Query Variables
Use Variables in Queries
Alerts in Dashboards
Dashboard Provisioning
dashboards.yml:
Common Dashboard Patterns
Infrastructure Dashboard
Key Panels:
- CPU utilization per node
- Memory usage per node
- Disk I/O
- Network traffic
- Pod count by namespace
- Node status
Database Dashboard
Key Panels:
- Queries per second
- Connection pool usage
- Query latency (P50, P95, P99)
- Active connections
- Database size
- Replication lag
- Slow queries
Application Dashboard
Key Panels:
- Request rate
- Error rate
- Response time (percentiles)
- Active users/sessions
- Cache hit rate
- Queue length
Best Practices
- Start with templates (Grafana community dashboards)
- Use consistent naming for panels and variables
- Group related metrics in rows
- Set appropriate time ranges (default: Last 6 hours)
- Use variables for flexibility
- Add panel descriptions for context
- Configure units correctly
- Set meaningful thresholds for colors
- Use consistent colors across dashboards
- Test with different time ranges
Dashboard as Code
Terraform Provisioning
Ansible Provisioning
Related Skills
prometheus-configuration- For metric collectionslo-implementation- For SLO dashboards

