A Tour of 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 the side menu is a helpful navigation hub, providing both quick access to simple creation pages and links to more complex functions, including data source creation,Explore mode, alert management, and server administration.

This chapter is intended to provide a mostly high-level tour of these major functions; we will go into more detail about each function 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...

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-7.0/tree/master/Chapter02.

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...

Glancing at the sidebar menu

Let's take a look at the more common sidebar menu buttons. Unless you are running Grafana in a special display mode, this menu bar will appear alongside your dashboard. Depending on the context, it may be accompanied by additional buttons, but we will look at the basic set.

The dashboards button

At the top of the dashboard is the dashboards button:

It displays the name of the current dashboard, and clicking on it takes you to the same dashboard search page as the search button described in the following section.

The dashboard panels

Below the dashboards button are the dashboard panels. Besides graphical data, panels can convey a wide variety of information, including textual and numerical data, spreadsheet-like tables, and lists of dashboards. The current Home dashboard serves as a landing page for the Grafana application by default, but you can always change the default to...

Learning to use the icons on Grafana's left sidebar

To the left of the dashboard itself is the left sidebar. These icons lead to some of the most powerful of Grafana's impressive features. For example, they enable you to do the following:

• Search for dashboards
• Create and import dashboards and folders
• Find dashboards
• Manage dashboards, dashboard playlists, and dashboard snapshots
• Explore data sources in a free-form fashion
• Manage alert rules and notification channels
• Configure data sources, users, and teams, download plugins, set preferences, and generate API keys
• Administer Grafana users and organizations and view the server settings and stats
• Return to the Home dashboard
• Set personal preferences
• Get help

Let's have a closer look at some of these features.

The Grafana logo

At the top-left corner of the sidebar, you...

Summary

There you have it—a quick tour of the basic Grafana interface. Of course, we have barely scratched the surface and we've hardly created a dashboard or panel! Before we start working with actual dashboard panels, now would be a good opportunity to explore the interface. Don't worry, you won't break anything! Here are some suggestions:

• When you are viewing a dashboard, click around and explore some of the basic dashboard controls.
• What happens when you click on a Dashboard title?
• What happens when you click on the gear icon on the dashboard?

In Chapter 3, An Introduction to the Graph Panel, we will cover a key feature of the Grafana interface—the Graph panel. If you plan to do any graphing, you're going to turn to the Graph panel. It's the most powerful and feature-rich of the panels available in Grafana, so we're going to spend the entire next chapter walking through its...