Organizing Dashboards

Welcome to the third and final section ofLearn Grafana 7.0: Managing Grafana. By now, you've created some awesome dashboards. Maybe you've even set up valuable alerts with some of those dashboards, and now you're in the enviable position of being your team's Grafana guru. That great honor will be accompanied by great responsibilities. You're now the de facto manager of your Grafana server and all the requisite administrative tasks that come along for the ride.

In this section of this book, we'll cover some of the more common aspects of Grafana management, from keeping your dashboards tidy to managing and authenticating your users and teams, to monitoring your applications in the cloud. In Section 2: Real-World Grafana, we used various realistic scenarios to drive the descriptions and the associated exercises. In this section, we will present the material in a more straightforward...

Technical requirements

The tutorial code, dashboards, and other helpful files for this chapter can be found in this book's GitHub repository at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Grafana-7.0/tree/master/Chapter11.

Let's get started!

Managing dashboards and folders

By now, you've probably created at least a handful of dashboards, if only to work through the examples in this book. Ideally, you're well on your way to creating many more, along with other members of your team, unit, and even your entire company. What you'll quickly find – if you haven't already – is that you've ended up with a number of dashboards in various stages of development and potentially connecting to a number of data sources, all of them lying around in the dashboard display.

Conceptually, Grafana provides four classification schemes aimed at helping you identify dashboards to satisfy common organizational needs. The first is what I call a significance-based scheme, which identifies the most important dashboard through a starred or favorited designation. The second is a structure-based scheme, which places dashboards into an arbitrary hierarchical structure of folders. The third scheme is...

Starring and tagging dashboards

Our previous sections mostly dealt with the key structural aspects of a dashboard: the name and its location in a specific folder. We will now turn to more semantic aspects, ones that are best described in terms of dashboard metadata, namely dashboard stars and labels. As we saw in Chapter 8, Working with Advanced Dashboard Features, dashboard tags prove useful when linking dashboards, but that's not the case for tags or stars, as we're about to find out.

Marking dashboards as favorites

Starred dashboards are mostly useful for when you want to highlight certain dashboards as important or otherwise memorable to you. They can be for bookmarking frequently accessed dashboard or for marking dashboards as needing some kind of special attention.

Dashboard stars are part of a user's preferences, so starring a dashboard won't make it starred to other users.

Starring dashboards is even...

Building and running dashboard playlists

A dashboard playlist is a selection of dashboards that can be played in a looped sequence. Any dashboard can appear in such a playlist. A playlist consists of one or more dashboards displayed in a sequence, separated by a specified interval. They're typically used to create an automated display cycle of dashboards for unattended venues such as kiosks or operation centers.

Creating a playlist

Before we can start running a playlist, we'll need to create one. The Playlists tab can be found on the Dashboards management page. Follow these steps:

1. From the left sidebar, select Dashboards | Playlists.
2. Click New Playlist.
3. Set a Name for the playlist. You will not be able to Create the playlist until you set a Name.
4. Set the time Interval between dashboards.
5. Click + to add a playlist for each dashboard you wish to add to the playlist. You can also add starred dashboards...

Exploring the dashboard list panel

If you've taken a look at the Home dashboard, then you're already familiar with the Dashboard List panel. It typically displays starred dashboards (for quick reference) and a list of recently visited dashboards. It can be configured with several more options. Let's open it up and see what else we can configure it to do.

Setting dashboard list panel options

Under the Options section of the Panel tab are the following settings and descriptions:

• Starred: Displays starred dashboards
• Recently viewed: Displays recently viewed dashboards
• Search: Displays the results of the Search section
• Show headings: Displays the headings for each option mentioned previously
• Max items: Sets the maximum number of items displayed of each type

The first three are toggle switches that enable and disable the display of starred, recently viewed, and search results...

Summary

This was a relatively easy introduction to some of the concepts involved in Grafana management. In this chapter, we looked at how to name dashboards and folders, as well as some strategies for creating folders, and also looked at starring and tagging dashboards and how they can be useful for grouping and filtering dashboards. Then, we created some dashboard playlists, a common function if you are creating dashboard presentations. Finally, we looked at how the dashboard list panel can be configured to help create catalogs of dashboards, especially by leveraging the search option and tags.

The intention here wasn't to reveal especially esoteric Grafana concepts – in fact, you may have already been working with some of the features we highlighted in this chapter. The goal was to get you to shift your thinking to a more operational viewpoint, one that must often take into account the potentially competing needs of different interested parties.

Just...