Creating Your First Dashboard

Welcome to the world of Grafana dashboards! If you've been using Grafana's Explore feature to run ad hoc queries and test your SQL against various data sources, you've probably noticed something: every time you close the browser or switch views, your queries disappear. While Explore is fantastic for experimentation and quick data investigation, it's not designed for ongoing monitoring or sharing insights with your team.

This is where dashboards come in. Dashboards are Grafana's answer to production monitoring. They allow you to save your queries as reusable panels, organize multiple visualizations on a single screen, and share them with others who need to monitor the same systems. Instead of running the same query manually every morning to check CPU usage, you can create a dashboard that displays that information automatically, updating in real time as new data arrives.

In this lesson, you'll create your first dashboard with three panels that monitor different aspects of system performance: CPU usage over time, average memory consumption, and disk usage for a specific host. By the end, you'll understand how to move from temporary query testing to building permanent monitoring solutions that you and your team can rely on.

You can create a new dashboard from scratch in either of these ways:

1. Navigate to the Dashboards section in the left sidebar, then click the New button and select New Dashboard
2. Click the + icon in the upper right corner of Grafana, which will show you options including New dashboard, Import dashboard, and New alert rule

Choose New dashboard using either method. Grafana will present you with a screen titled “Start your new dashboard by adding a visualization” with several options:

• Add visualization - Select a data source and then query and visualize your data with charts, stats and tables or create lists, markdowns and other widgets
• Add library panel - Import visualizations that are shared with other dashboards
• Import dashboard - Import dashboards from files or grafana.com