Grafana — Effective Dashboards

DevOps Intermediate

Grafana — Effective Dashboards¶

GrafanaDashboardsMonitoringObservability 5 min read

Best practices for Grafana dashboards. Dashboard as Code, provisioning, alerting and design principles.

Dashboard Design Principles¶

• USE method — Utilization, Saturation, Errors for each resource
• RED method — Rate, Errors, Duration for each service
• Hierarchy — Overview, then Service, then Detail (drill-down)
• Max 10-12 panels per dashboard
• Consistent colors — green OK, yellow warning, red critical

Dashboard as Code¶

# Provisioning
apiVersion: 1
providers:
  - name: default
    orgId: 1
    folder: ''
    type: file
    options:
      path: /var/lib/grafana/dashboards

# Grafonnet (Jsonnet)
local grafana = import 'grafonnet/grafana.libsonnet';
local dashboard = grafana.dashboard;
local prometheus = grafana.prometheus;

dashboard.new('API Overview', tags=['api'])
.addPanel(
  grafana.graphPanel.new('Request Rate', datasource='Prometheus')
  .addTarget(prometheus.target('sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m]))'))
, gridPos={x:0, y:0, w:12, h:8})

Alerting¶

apiVersion: 1
groups:
  - orgId: 1
    name: sre-alerts
    folder: SRE
    interval: 1m
    rules:
      - uid: high-error-rate
        title: High Error Rate
        condition: C
        data:
          - refId: A
            datasourceUid: prometheus
            model:
              expr: sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])) / sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) * 100
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: critical

Summary¶

Effective Grafana dashboards follow USE/RED principles, are versioned as code, and have a clear hierarchy.

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