---
title: "About dashboards and visualizations | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn about observability and how you can harness the power of dashboards and visualizations to solve problems"
---

# About dashboards and visualizations

Observability is a cornerstone of site reliability engineering (SRE). It enables engineers to gain deep insights into the health, performance, and behavior of complex systems. By collecting and analyzing telemetry data such as logs, metrics, and traces, observability helps identify and resolve issues before they impact users.

Dashboards and visualizations are critical tools in this process. They provide a clear, real-time view of system performance, making it easier to detect anomalies, track trends, and correlate events. For example:

- The trace table shows all traces that match the TraceQL query. While useful in seeing a list of traces, this view is of limited utility in troubleshooting.

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- The trace panel used in conjunction with the trace table enables users to select a specific trace and see more details about the trace span.

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- Metrics applied to traces lets you extend trace queries by applying a function to trace query results. This feature allows for ad hoc aggregation of any TraceQL query by any available dimension.

Dashboards and visualizations transform raw data into actionable insights, empowering SREs to maintain high availability, optimize resource allocation, and deliver a seamless user experience—all while saving the business money by minimizing disruptions and operational inefficiencies. By leveraging these visualizations, businesses can prevent costly downtime and maintain customer trust.

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### More to explore

- [Grafana dashboards overview](/docs/grafana-cloud/introduction/dashboards/)
- [Metrics and visualizations](/docs/grafana-cloud/introduction/metrics-and-visualizations/)