Explore dashboards

Dashboards are the primary way you visualize and monitor your data in Grafana Cloud. A dashboard is a collection of panels. Each panel displays a specific visualization such as a time series graph, a gauge, a table, or a statistic.

To locate options for dashboards in Grafana Cloud, complete the following steps:

1. Open the main menu, and click Dashboards.

2. Click New to open a drop-down menu with the following options: New dashboard, Dashboard from template, New folder, and Import. Select New dashboard.

Here’s an explanation of the other options in the drop-down menu:

• Dashboard from template: Start from a prebuilt template.
• New folder: Organize dashboards into folders.
• Import: Paste a JSON file or pull a prebuilt dashboard from the Grafana dashboard library.

Notice on the New dashboard screen that you have three steps to walk through:

1. Connect: Choose a data source from the catalog (Prometheus, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, and many more).
2. Configure: Enter connection details for the data source you selected.
3. Visualize: Build your first panel using the connected data.

If you’ve already connected a data source, you’ll click Skip to dashboard. If you haven’t connected data yet, you can choose the demo data to create a dashboard.

Observability solutions and integrations provide prebuilt dashboards. This means you can start monitoring without building anything yourself. Refer to Use observability solutions for faster time-to-value to learn more.

In the next milestone, you reach the end of this tour.