Grafana Dashboards

Overview

Grafana visualizes metrics and logs in dashboards that support monitoring, troubleshooting, and operations reporting.

Dashboard Design Principles

• Start from service objectives
• Show golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, saturation
• Include drill-down panels for diagnostics
• Keep naming and units consistent

flowchart TD
    A[Data Sources] --> B[Grafana Panels]
    B --> C[Team Dashboard]
    C --> D[Operational Decisions]

Practical Example

A service dashboard commonly includes:

• Request rate by endpoint
• p95 latency per route
• Error rate trend
• CPU and memory saturation

Production Example

On-call runbooks often link directly to pre-filtered Grafana dashboards for tenant, region, and deployment version.

Common Pitfalls

• Overloaded dashboards with too many panels
• Missing annotations for deployments
• Inconsistent panel time ranges and units

Key Takeaways

• Dashboards should guide fast decisions during incidents.
• Simplicity and consistent design improve usability.
• Operational context increases dashboard value.