Touring the Grafana Interface

By this point, you’ve successfully installed and run Grafana, so next, we’re going to familiarize ourselves with the Grafana user interface (UI). In this chapter, we will take a general tour of the default Home dashboard, mostly concentrating on the sidebar menu. While you will spend the majority of your time interacting directly with dashboards and panels, you will find that the sidebar is a helpful navigation hub, providing both quick access to simple creation pages and links to more complex functions, including data source creation, Explore, alert management, and server administration.

Note

This chapter is intended to provide a (mostly) high-level tour of these major features. We will go into more detail about many of these features later in the book. I’ll point out which chapters correspond to the topics covered. If you’re already somewhat familiar with Grafana, this chapter should serve as a quick review and a point...

Technical requirements

Tutorial code, dashboards, and other helpful files for this chapter can be found in the book’s GitHub repository at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Grafana-10/tree/main/Chapter02.

Exploring Grafana—the Home dashboard

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

Figure 2.1 – The Home dashboard

The following are key UI elements located on the Home dashboard:

1. The Grafana logo button: This returns the user to the Home dashboard.
2. Organization menu: This allows you to switch organizations.
3. Search or jump to…: This searches for or jumps to various actions, pages, or preferences.
4. Dashboard menu: This adds or imports dashboards and creates alert rules.
5. Help menu: This links to documentation, support, and community pages.
6. Grafana News: This opens the latest Grafana blog posts.
7. User menu: This links to the user profile and preference settings or signs the user out.
8. Menu toggle: This opens the main menu.
9. Add menu: This adds panel...

Introducing the Grafana search bar

There are two main UI components visible on the Home dashboard:

• Search bar at the top
• Dashboard below

Each dashboard UI is organized around two main components:

• A dashboard title bar containing the main menu
• Dashboard rows and panels

Let’s start by taking a look at the controls on our Home dashboard. Depending upon the nature of the dashboard, you may see additional controls, which we will highlight later. For now, let’s keep things simple by looking at the basic controls.

At the top of the interface is the search bar. This contains several navigational features. If you’re familiar with older versions of Grafana, you will know that they were located in a side menu.

The portion of the dashboard that contains panels is the entire space below the title bar (as seen in Figure 2.1). The title bar contains the main side menu on the left and a set of controls on the right. The controls enable...

Expanding Grafana’s main menu

The Grafana menu has been somewhat restructured in Grafana 10 compared to previous versions. Some items have been moved to other parts of the interface while others have been renamed. Many of the main menu items have additional submenu items that can be revealed by clicking on the disclosure icon. The state of the Grafana menu is kept even when it is hidden. A complete explanation of each item will not be provided here, but rest assured that we will cover most of them in later chapters of this book!

At the top level are the following Grafana menu options:

• Home
• Starred
• Dashboards
• Explore
• Alerting
• Connections
• Administration

The icons in this menu lead to some of the most common yet impressive features of Grafana. For example, from this menu you can do the following:

• Return to the Home dashboard
• Create and manage dashboards and folders
• Explore data sources in an ad hoc fashion
• Create and...

Exploring the Grafana dashboard UI

Let’s step back and look at a dashboard. It is divided into a title bar with several controls and a content area that contains our visualization panels and rows. We’ll spend plenty of time talking about how to add and organize dashboard content. For now, let’s become familiar with the dashboard’s title bar controls.

Grafana dashboard title bar

At the top of the dashboard is a title bar with the following controls:

• Grafana menu toggle
• Home dashboard breadcrumb
• Add menu
• Dashboard settings
• Search bar toggle

We’ve already introduced the Grafana menu located on the far left of the dashboard title bar. We’ll now start with the breadcrumbs that indicate our dashboard page name and its position in the folder hierarchy.

Breadcrumbs

While navigating from one page to the next or into dashboard folders, the breadcrumb interface provides a series of links to each level in the...

Summary

There you have it—a tour of the basic Grafana interface. We looked at the Grafana UI, identified key elements, and took a closer look at some of them, including the search bar, the Grafana menu, and the dashboard. Of course, we have barely scratched the surface and we’ve scarcely created a dashboard or visualization panel!

In Chapter 3, Diving into Grafana's Time Series Visualization, we will cover a key feature of the Grafana interface—the time series visualization. If you plan to do any graphing, you’re going to be using the time series visualization. It’s the most powerful and feature-rich of the panels available in Grafana, so we’re going to spend the entire next chapter going over its interface. After that, in Chapter 4, Connecting Grafana to a Prometheus Data Source, we’ll complete our introduction to Grafana’s interface by looking at data sources and how they bring time series data to Grafana.