Dashboards
Compose widgets into a view, and save the view your team looks at.
Widgets #
A dashboard is a grid of widgets. Each widget shows one question about your system, and the grid is twelve columns wide.
- Timeseries — a line chart of a value over time.
- Area — the same, filled, which reads better when several series overlap.
- Bars — discrete columns, for a value per category rather than over time.
- Top list — the highest values of a grouped metric.
- Query value — a single current number.
- Heatmap — distribution across time buckets.
- Distribution — the shape of a value's spread.
- Monitor summary — the current state of a set of monitors.
- SLO — an objective's budget consumption.
- Note — free text, for a heading or a runbook link.
Laying out a dashboard #
- The grid is twelve columns wide, with each row eighty pixels tall.
- Every widget is at least two columns wide and two rows tall.
- A widget may be up to eight rows tall.
- Widgets snap to the grid as you drag.
Layouts live in the browser you arrange them in
Rearranging a dashboard changes it for you, and the share link is how you show someone the arrangement you made. Anyone else opening the same dashboard sees the arrangement it shipped with. Restoring the original layout is one click away, so it is always possible to come back.
Template variables #
A variable filters every widget on the dashboard at once, which is how one dashboard serves every environment.
- env — restrict it to one environment.
- host — restrict it to one machine.
Each variable defaults to *, meaning every value. Choosing a value filters every widget, and the choice is held in the address, so a link carries it with it.
Dashboard graphs #
A dashboard graph builds a chart from a metric in a single step, which is the quick way to answer a question without arranging widgets around it.
Saved views #
A saved view stores a search with its filters, so a filtered investigation can be reopened later rather than retyped. A view holds a name, the query, the time range and the sort, and can be shared across the organisation.
Views belong to searching rather than to dashboards. They are used in Searching traces and in log search, where the filters are the interesting part of what you were looking at.
Start from a template. The shipped dashboards already arrange the widgets a common question needs, and you can replace them one at a time.
Onward #
The view is half the picture: Monitors is how the same conditions tell you about themselves, and Dashboards and monitors covers how the two work together.