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.

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.
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.

More to explore (optional)

At this point in your journey, you can explore the following paths:

• Grafana dashboard best practices
• Visualizations