grafana-dashboards

SKILL.md

Grafana Dashboards

Create and manage production-ready Grafana dashboards for comprehensive system observability.

Purpose

Design effective Grafana dashboards for monitoring applications, infrastructure, and business metrics.

When to Use

Visualize Prometheus metrics

Create custom dashboards

Implement SLO dashboards

Monitor infrastructure

Track business KPIs

Dashboard Design Principles

1. Hierarchy of Information
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Critical Metrics (Big Numbers)     │
├─────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Key Trends (Time Series)           │
├─────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Detailed Metrics (Tables/Heatmaps) │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘

2. RED Method (Services)

Rate - Requests per second

Errors - Error rate

Duration - Latency/response time

3. USE Method (Resources)

Utilization - % time resource is busy

Saturation - Queue length/wait time

Errors - Error count

Dashboard Structure

API Monitoring Dashboard

{
  "dashboard": {
    "title": "API Monitoring",
    "tags": ["api", "production"],
    "timezone": "browser",
    "refresh": "30s",
    "panels": [
      {
        "title": "Request Rate",
        "type": "graph",
        "targets": [
          {
            "expr": "sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) by (service)",
            "legendFormat": "{{service}}"
          }
        ],
        "gridPos": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 12, "h": 8 }
      },
      {
        "title": "Error Rate %",
        "type": "graph",
        "targets": [
          {
            "expr": "(sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~\"5..\"}[5m])) / sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m]))) * 100",
            "legendFormat": "Error Rate"
          }
        ],
        "alert": {
          "conditions": [
            {
              "evaluator": { "params": [5], "type": "gt" },
              "operator": { "type": "and" },
              "query": { "params": ["A", "5m", "now"] },
              "type": "query"
            }
          ]
        },
        "gridPos": { "x": 12, "y": 0, "w": 12, "h": 8 }
      },
      {
        "title": "P95 Latency",
        "type": "graph",
        "targets": [
          {
            "expr": "histogram_quantile(0.95, sum(rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le, service))",
            "legendFormat": "{{service}}"
          }
        ],
        "gridPos": { "x": 0, "y": 8, "w": 24, "h": 8 }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Reference: See assets/api-dashboard.json

Panel Types

1. Stat Panel (Single Value)

{
  "type": "stat",
  "title": "Total Requests",
  "targets": [
    {
      "expr": "sum(http_requests_total)"
    }
  ],
  "options": {
    "reduceOptions": {
      "values": false,
      "calcs": ["lastNotNull"]
    },
    "orientation": "auto",
    "textMode": "auto",
    "colorMode": "value"
  },
  "fieldConfig": {
    "defaults": {
      "thresholds": {
        "mode": "absolute",
        "steps": [
          { "value": 0, "color": "green" },
          { "value": 80, "color": "yellow" },
          { "value": 90, "color": "red" }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

2. Time Series Graph

{
  "type": "graph",
  "title": "CPU Usage",
  "targets": [
    {
      "expr": "100 - (avg by (instance) (rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode=\"idle\"}[5m])) * 100)"
    }
  ],
  "yaxes": [
    { "format": "percent", "max": 100, "min": 0 },
    { "format": "short" }
  ]
}

3. Table Panel

{
  "type": "table",
  "title": "Service Status",
  "targets": [
    {
      "expr": "up",
      "format": "table",
      "instant": true
    }
  ],
  "transformations": [
    {
      "id": "organize",
      "options": {
        "excludeByName": { "Time": true },
        "indexByName": {},
        "renameByName": {
          "instance": "Instance",
          "job": "Service",
          "Value": "Status"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

4. Heatmap

{
  "type": "heatmap",
  "title": "Latency Heatmap",
  "targets": [
    {
      "expr": "sum(rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le)",
      "format": "heatmap"
    }
  ],
  "dataFormat": "tsbuckets",
  "yAxis": {
    "format": "s"
  }
}

Variables

Query Variables

{
  "templating": {
    "list": [
      {
        "name": "namespace",
        "type": "query",
        "datasource": "Prometheus",
        "query": "label_values(kube_pod_info, namespace)",
        "refresh": 1,
        "multi": false
      },
      {
        "name": "service",
        "type": "query",
        "datasource": "Prometheus",
        "query": "label_values(kube_service_info{namespace=\"$namespace\"}, service)",
        "refresh": 1,
        "multi": true
      }
    ]
  }
}

Use Variables in Queries

sum(rate(http_requests_total{namespace="$namespace", service=~"$service"}[5m]))

Alerts in Dashboards

{
  "alert": {
    "name": "High Error Rate",
    "conditions": [
      {
        "evaluator": {
          "params": [5],
          "type": "gt"
        },
        "operator": { "type": "and" },
        "query": {
          "params": ["A", "5m", "now"]
        },
        "reducer": { "type": "avg" },
        "type": "query"
      }
    ],
    "executionErrorState": "alerting",
    "for": "5m",
    "frequency": "1m",
    "message": "Error rate is above 5%",
    "noDataState": "no_data",
    "notifications": [{ "uid": "slack-channel" }]
  }
}

Dashboard Provisioning

dashboards.yml:

apiVersion: 1

providers:
  - name: "default"
    orgId: 1
    folder: "General"
    type: file
    disableDeletion: false
    updateIntervalSeconds: 10
    allowUiUpdates: true
    options:
      path: /etc/grafana/dashboards

Common Dashboard Patterns

Infrastructure Dashboard

Key Panels:

CPU utilization per node

Memory usage per node

Disk I/O

Network traffic

Pod count by namespace

Node status

Reference: See assets/infrastructure-dashboard.json

Database Dashboard

Key Panels:

Queries per second

Connection pool usage

Query latency (P50, P95, P99)

Active connections

Database size

Replication lag

Slow queries

Reference: See assets/database-dashboard.json

Application Dashboard

Key Panels:

Request rate

Error rate

Response time (percentiles)

Active users/sessions

Cache hit rate

Queue length

Best Practices

Start with templates (Grafana community dashboards)

Use consistent naming for panels and variables

Group related metrics in rows

Set appropriate time ranges (default: Last 6 hours)

Use variables for flexibility

Add panel descriptions for context

Configure units correctly

Set meaningful thresholds for colors

Use consistent colors across dashboards

Test with different time ranges

Dashboard as Code

Terraform Provisioning

resource "grafana_dashboard" "api_monitoring" {
  config_json = file("${path.module}/dashboards/api-monitoring.json")
  folder      = grafana_folder.monitoring.id
}

resource "grafana_folder" "monitoring" {
  title = "Production Monitoring"
}

Ansible Provisioning

- name: Deploy Grafana dashboards
  copy:
    src: "{{ item }}"
    dest: /etc/grafana/dashboards/
  with_fileglob:
    - "dashboards/*.json"
  notify: restart grafana

Related Skills

prometheus-configuration - For metric collection

slo-implementation - For SLO dashboards