---
title: "Explore dashboards | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn what options are available to create dashboards"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# 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.

1. Open the main menu, and click **Dashboards**.
2. Click the New button 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](/dashboards).

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](/docs/grafana-cloud/introduction/#use-observability-solutions-for-faster-time-to-value) to learn more.

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

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### More to explore (optional)

At this point in your path, you can explore the following topics:

- [Dashboards](/docs/grafana-cloud/visualizations/)