Create a dashboard and add a visualization

A Grafana dashboard is a set of one or more panels, organized and arranged into one or more rows, that provide an at-a-glance view of related information. These panels are created using components that query and transform raw data from a data source into visualizations.

A data source can be an SQL database, Grafana Loki, Grafana Mimir, or an API endpoint. It can even be a basic CSV file. Data source plugins take a query you want answered, retrieve the data from the data source, and reconcile the differences between the data model of the data source and the data model of Grafana dashboards.

To create a dashboard and add a visualization, perform the following steps:

1. Sign in to your Grafana Cloud environment, for example mystack.grafana.net.
2. On the Grafana Cloud home page, open the navigation menu on the left side of the page and click Dashboards.
3. Click New > Dashboard.
4. Add a visualization:
   1. Click Add visualization.
   2. Search for a logs data source
   3. Select a logs data source
5. Switch to the Logs visualization:
   1. From the Options pane located on the right of the page, click Change.
   2. Select the Logs visualization.

In your next milestone, you’ll use the Query Builder to write a LogQL query that generates a visualization.