Exploring Grafana – the Home dashboard

After logging in to the Grafana application, you should end up on the Home dashboard, as shown. Here, I've annotated some of the key UI elements in the Grafana interface:

Here are the UI elements visible on the default Home dashboard:

1. The Grafana logo button: Returns the user to the Home dashboard
2. The dashboards button: Displays the current dashboard
3. The dashboard settings and view mode
4. The dashboard panel: Shows the favorite and recently viewed dashboards
5. The side menu bar: Provides navigation to common tasks and pages
6. The user and help buttons

Grafana is structured around two main interactive UI components that together constitute its core functionality: dashboards and panels. The page in the preceding screenshot is composed of a side menu bar to the left and a dashboard to the right—specifically, the Home dashboard. A dashboard is a kind of canvas upon which you can display one or more panels in a grid-style arrangement. It also serves as a web page, so you can bookmark or share it with a simple URL. The entire dashboard can even be imported and exported in JSON text file format, making it easy to share, save, or transfer to another version of Grafana.

The fundamental building blocks of the functionality of the dashboard are the panels. Panels fulfill a number of roles, from generating graphs, organizing data into tables, and displaying useful text to simply contain a menu list of dashboards—which happens to be the kind of panel you see on the Home dashboard in the preceding screenshot. Panels are implemented as a plugin to Grafana, so any capable developer can add to the variety of Grafana panels by creating new ones.

In Chapter 3, An Introduction to the Graph Panel, we'll be taking a much closer look at what might be considered the canonical Grafana panel—the Graph panel.