.Business Features v14.0

Panel

A dashboard consists of panels displaying data in beautiful graphs, charts, and other visualizations. These panels are created using components that transform raw data from a data source into visualizations. The process involves passing data through three gates: a plugin, a query, and an optional transformation. The panel is the basic visualization building block. Each panel has a query editor specific to the data source selected in the panel. The query editor allows you to build a query that returns the data you want to visualize.

There is a wide variety of styling and formatting options for each panel. Panels can be dragged, dropped, and resized to rearrange them on the dashboard.

Before you add a panel, ensure that you have configured a data source.

Data Source

A data source refers to any entity that consists of data. It can be an SQL database, Postgres, influx and many others. It can even be a basic CSV file. The first step in creating a dashboard visualization is selecting the data source containing the needed data.

Types of data sources that are supported:

• Alertmanager
• AWS CloudWatch
• Azure Monitor
• Elasticsearch
• Google Cloud Monitoring
• Graphite
• InfluxDB
• Jaeger
• Loki
• Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)
• MySQL
• OpenTSDB
• PostgreSQL
• Prometheus
• Tempo
• Testdata
• Zipkin

Visualization

Our solution offers a variety of visualizations to support different use cases. This documentation section highlights the built-in visualizations, their options, and typical usage.

Some of the graphical presentation examples are:

1. Graphs and Charts
   • Time series is the default and main Graph visualization.
   • State timeline for state changes over time.
   • Status history for the periodic state over time.
   • Bar chart shows any categorical data.
   • Histogram calculates and shows value distribution in a bar chart.
   • Heatmap visualizes data in two dimensions, used typically for the magnitude of a phenomenon.
   • Pie chart is typically used where proportionality is important.
   • Candlestick is typically for financial data where the focus is price/data movement.
2. Stats and Numbers
   • Stat for big stats and optional sparkline.
   • Bar gauge is a horizontal or vertical bar gauge.
3. Misc
   • Table is the main and only table visualization.
   • Logs is the main visualization for logs.
   • Node graph for directed graphs or networks.
   • Traces is the main visualization for traces.
   • Flame graph is the main visualization for profiling.
4. Widgets
   • Dashboard list can list dashboards.
   • Alert list can list alerts.
   • Text can show markdown and HTML.
   • News can show RSS feeds.

EXAMPLES

Graphs

For time based line, area and bar charts we recommend the default time series visualization. This public demo dashboard contains many different examples for how this visualization can be configured and styled.

Time Series

For categorical data use a bar chart.

Bar Chart

Big Numbers and Stats

A stat shows one large stat value with an optional graph sparkline. You can control the background or value color using thresholds or color scales.

Gauge

If you want to present a value as it relates to a min and max value you have two options. First a standard radial gauge shown below.

Table

To show data in a table layout, use a table.

Pie Chart

To display reduced series, or values in a series, from one or more queries, as they relate to each other, use a pie chart.

Alerting

Alerting allows you to learn about problems in your systems moments after they occur.

Monitor your incoming metrics data or log entries and set up your Alerting system to watch for specific events or circumstances and then send notifications when those things are found.

Threshold

A threshold is a value that you specify for a metric that is visually reflected in a dashboard when the threshold value is met or exceeded.

Thresholds provide one method for you to conditionally style and color your visualizations based on query results. You can apply thresholds to most, but not all, visualizations.

There are two types of Threshold:

• Absolute thresholds are defined by a number. For example, 80 on a scale of 1 to 150.
• Percentage thresholds are defined relative to minimum or maximum. For example, 80 percent.