---
title: "Create a dashboard and add a visualization | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn how to start building your visualization"
---

# 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, complete the following steps:

1. Sign in to your Grafana Cloud environment, for example `mystack.grafana.net`.
2. Click **Dashboards** in the main menu.
3. Click **New** and select **New Dashboard**.
4. In the **Add** drawer, click the **Panel** card to add a new visualization to your dashboard.
   
   A new panel is added to your dashboard.
5. On the new panel, enter a panel title and description, and click **Configure** to open the Edit panel view.
6. In the **Queries** tab, click the **Data source** drop-down list and select a traces data source (such as Tempo).
7. From the visualization picker on the right, click **All visualizations** and select **Table**.

In your next milestone, you’ll use the Query Builder to write a TraceQL query that generates a list of traces.

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### More to explore

- [Grafana dashboard best practices](/docs/grafana-cloud/visualizations/dashboards/build-dashboards/best-practices/)
- [Visualizations](/docs/grafana/latest/panels-visualizations/visualizations/)