Manage dashboards

The Assistant can help you find, understand, create, and edit Grafana dashboards. Whether you need to visualize a new service or fix an existing panel, the Assistant can handle the heavy lifting of query writing and configuration.

Find and understand dashboards

You can ask the Assistant to locate dashboards relevant to a specific service or team, and explain what they show. This is helpful when you’re exploring a new environment or need to understand complex visualizations.

Find relevant dashboards

Locate dashboards by service, team, or concept. The Assistant uses semantic search to find dashboards based on their content and relevance, not just exact name matches.

Find dashboards related to payment processing latency.

Understand visualizations

Get an explanation of complex panels to understand what the data represents.

Explain what the Transaction rate panel is showing.

Identify data sources

Check which data source is powering a specific visualization.

What data source is the Latency panel using?

Create a new dashboard

The Assistant can scaffold a complete dashboard based on your requirements. Describe the goal of the dashboard and the metrics you want to include, and the Assistant will generate the panels for you. It will also validate the panels to ensure data is returned and report any configuration errors.

Describe the dashboard

Tell the Assistant what you want to build.

Create a dashboard called ‘Checkout Health’ with panels for error rate, p95 latency, and request volume.

Specify data sources

Mention the data sources you want to use to ensure accurate queries.

Use @prometheus-prod for metrics and @loki-prod for logs.

Review and save

The Assistant checks for data errors during creation to minimize “No Data” panels. Review the generated panels and save the dashboard.

Edit and improve dashboards

You can modify existing dashboards to better fit your needs. The Assistant can help you update queries, change visualizations, and organize the layout.

Modify panels

Context is key when editing. Select the panel you want to change, or have the dashboard open in your browser. You can select multiple panels to provide broader context by holding Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) while clicking.

Change visualization types

Switch how data is displayed to better suit the metric.

Change the Error Rate panel to a bar gauge.

Refine queries

Adjust the query to filter specific data or change aggregations.

Update the Latency query to filter out 4xx errors.

Add context

Improve dashboard documentation by adding descriptions to panels.

Add a description to the Request Volume panel explaining it excludes health checks.

Explore metrics

You can quickly drill down into metric visualizations to explore the underlying data. Look for the drilldown button on metric panels to navigate to Explore mode with the query pre-filled.