Dashboarding 101: Best practices to build and edit Grafana dashboards

We hear you: that blank-page anxiety can be real. 

In this beginner-friendly hands-on lab, you’ll walk through how to build, iterate, and customize a Grafana dashboard step by step, so you can quickly and confidently gain meaningful insights into your data. 

Emphasizing discoverability and rapid time-to-value, this lab offers a deep dive on the fundamental components of a Grafana dashboard, including panels, visualizations, queries, template variables, and the time picker. You’ll learn tips and tricks for creating dashboards faster, such as using templates, and how to customize and refine layouts based on your visualization needs. 

By the end of the three hours, you will:

• Understand the various parts of a Grafana dashboard, including panels, queries, and variables, and when and how to use them
• Use templates to kick-start dashboard creation
• Iterate on a dashboard by refining layouts and adapting visualization types based on use case
• Create template variables to enrich your dashboards and make them more interactive for viewers
• Create an alert from a dashboard

Requirements:

• Laptop with WiFi access

This session is tailored for dashboard creators, SREs, and data analysts.