Create your first Grafana dashboard

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Avi

Avi is a tech enthusiast with expertise in trending technologies, such as DevOps, cloud computing, and big data. He is passionate about learning cutting-edge technologies and sharing his knowledge with others.

Latest posts by Avi (see all)

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• Create your first Grafana dashboard - Mon, Sep 18 2023
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What is Grafana?

Before creating your first dashboard, let's briefly understand what Grafana is. Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that allows you to connect and visualize data from various sources in real-time. It supports various data sources, including databases, cloud services, and even custom data collectors. Popular examples are Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Monitoring, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL.

In addition, many plugins for Grafana exist. Grafana plugins are extensions that allow you to customize and extend Grafana's functionality. There are three types of plugins: data source plugins, app plugins (bundle data sources and panels), and panel plugins (visualizations for your dashboards).

Grafana's strength lies in its ability to provide interactive and customizable dashboards, making data exploration and analysis seamless and intuitive.

To get started with creating your first Grafana dashboard, you'll only need to ensure you have Grafana installed and running on your system. You can download it from the official Grafana website.

Step 1: Log in to Grafana

Open your web browser and navigate to the Grafana dashboard by entering the appropriate URL (usually http://localhost:3000). Log in using your credentials. If you're accessing Grafana remotely, replace localhost with the proper hostname or IP address.

Grafana Login

After successful login, you will land on the "Welcome to Grafana" page.

Welcome to Grafana

Step 2: Setting up a data source

The first step in creating a dashboard is to set up a data source. A data source is a connection to a data store, such as a database or a time series database.

To set up a data source in Grafana, follow these steps:

1. Click Data sources in the left menu.
   

   Grafana data sources

2. Click Add data source.
   

   Add data source

3. Select the type of data source you want to connect to.
   

   MySQL data source

4. Enter the connection details for your data source.
   

   MySQL connection

5. Click Test connection  to verify that the connection is successful.
   

   Save test

6. Click Save & testto save your data source.

Step 3: Creating a Dashboard

You can create a dashboard once you have set up a data source. A dashboard is a panel collection that displays data from your sources.

To create a dashboard in Grafana:

1. Click Dashboards in the left menu.
   

   Dashboards home

2. Click New > New dashboard.
   

   New dashboard

3. Click Add visualization.
   

   Add visualization

4. Click a data source. I am selecting MySQL.
   

   Select a data source

Now, the default dashboard will open. Initially, for the first 5–10 seconds, there will be no data on the dashboard.

Default dashboard

There are many different types of panels that you can add to your dashboard. Some of the most common include:

• Time series charts: These charts display data over time.
• Gauges: These gauges display a single metric, such as CPU utilization.
• Tables: These tables display data in tabular format.
• Text: These panels can be used to display text, such as a title or a description.

Visualizations

Once you choose the visualization for the panel, data will flow after a minute or two. You will see data coming to the dashboard and the visualization appearing on the screen, as shown below.

Grafana dashboard

When you click Save, you will have the option to name the dashboard.

Save dashboard

Step 4: Importing Grafana Dashboard

Now, I will import a dashboard from Grafana.com.

Grafana provides many ready-made dashboards that you can easily import. Just click + > Import dashboard. Enter the Grafana dashboard URL or ID, and click Load.

Import dashboard

Finally, click Import.

Import MySQL dashboard

Within a few minutes, you will see the data flowing in all the panels of the dashboard. Below are the details shown in the dashboard panel:

• MySQL Network Traffic
• MySQL Network Usage Hourly
• MySQL Internal Memory Overview

MySQL Overview dashboard in Grafana

This Grafana dashboard also shows MySQL Uptime, Current QPS, InnoDB Buffer Pool Size, Buffer Pool Size of Total RAM, and other panels for showing Connections, Table Locks, Temporary Objects, Sorts, Aborted, Network, Memory, etc.

MySQL dashboard with MySQL Uptime Current QPS InnoDB Buffer Pool Size Buffer Pool Size

Sharing your dashboard

Once you have created your dashboard, you can share it with others. To share your dashboard, follow these steps:

Click Share  in the top right corner of the dashboard. Send the link URL to those you want to access this dashboard.

Sharing the Grafana dashboard

Conclusion

Creating your first dashboard in Grafana is a simple process. By following the steps in this blog post, you can create a dashboard that displays data from your data sources in a way that is easy to understand and use. I hope this blog post was helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.