Grafana is a great way to visualize data. It is a great alternative to Power Bi, Tableau, Qlikview, and several others in the domain, though all these are great business intelligence visualization tools.
Grafana dashboards can be used for many purposes. Businesses and organizations can use Grafana dashboards to visualize analytics and present them in an easy to understand manner.
Whether you operate a small business, a health clinic, or a power plant, you can use intelligence data presented in Grafana dashboards to manage your company and make better business decisions.
Now that Grafana has an Amazon Web Services IoT Sitewise plugin, you also visualize and manage your equipment data using a Grafana dashboard.
In this article, I will go over the 15 best Grafana dashboard examples. Whether you are curious about how Grafana dashboards look or would like to see some examples to take inspiration from, this article is for you.
Let’s get into it.
Best Grafana Dashboard Examples
1. Customer Overview Dashboard
This dashboard is for businesses who want to monitor the activity of their customers. Using this dashboard, you can stay on track of what your customers are doing, as well as any new customers you are getting.
What This Dashboard Does
Using this dashboard, you can track and get alerts about:
- How many people have signed up recently
- How many people have logged in
- How many support calls were made
- Charts and graphs displaying how many payments were completed
- Graphs displaying how many reviews were left by customers
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- Businesses are able to see if sign-ups have gone up or down
- Businesses can be alerted about a rush of new reviews, which may point to spam
- Companies can see if a lot of people are logging out vs. a small number of people logging in, indicating that usage has been going down
Interesting Post: Best Tableau Retail Dashboard Examples
2. Temperature Dashboard
This dashboard helps you track the temperature over time. If it is useful for scientists and others who are interested in weather patterns.
It can also be used to track other things happening in cities around the world.
This is based on a Google Sheets dashboard. The Google Sheets dashboard can incorporate various other data points that are not related to weather or temperature; this dashboard is just an example.
What This Dashboard Does
Using this dashboard, you can visualize data such as:
- A table displaying and comparing the average temperature in different cities during each month of the year
- A line graph helping you visualize when the weather was hotter or colder in one city vs. the other (you can see when winter started in each city, for example, and how long it lasted)
- Compare the all-year average for each city to see which cities are hotter or colder
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- It is a great way to visualize data from Google Sheets
- You can easily compare different cities or similar data points and see averages for each
Check Out: Best Tableau Sales Dashboard Examples
3. Community Site
If you operate a community site, such as a forum, this dashboard will prove to be useful. It helps you track the activity on your site and shows how people are engaging with each other.
The Grafana Stats dashboard can be used to track other data not related to a community site as well. The Community Site dashboard is just an example of how the Grafana Stats dashboard can be used.
What This Dashboard Does
With this dashboard, you will be able to track new topics that were posted on your forum. You will be able to see, for example:
- Total new topics
- How many topics were answered
- How many topics were left unanswered
- The percentage of topics that were answered
This can help you gauge whether people are getting the help they need on your forum or whether you might want to encourage new activity. You may even hire a moderator to help community members who are posting questions asking for help.
You will also be able to see graphs displaying the percentage of topics with a response and the percentage of those without a response (for each day).
This can help you see when engagement and activity on your forum drops – for example, it might drop during the week and pick up on weekends when people have more time.
You can use this information to help community members. For example, you might decide that it would be best to hire a moderator during the week, when fewer community members are active, or you might send an email about new topics that were recently posted to encourage engagement during times when activity tends to be low.
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- Forum owners will be better able to understand engagement and activity on their forum
- It helps forum owners help their community members
4. Stats Overview
The Stats Overview dashboard helps you keep track of all your stats and metrics. Regardless of what you are tracking, you can see all of your data in one place, at any time.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard contains panels with different stats and metrics. You can track things such as:
- Memory and CPU usage over time
- Logins over time
- Sign-ups vs. sign-outs
- Server requests
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- You can easily track your CPU usage, along with all your other stats, in one place
- Drag and drop panels to the top of the dashboard if certain stats are more important than others, and you want them to be in the forefront
5. Website Trends Dashboard
If you want to track website metrics, such as logins, server requests, Google hits, and more, you can use this dashboard. It is important to know how your website is performing if you want to provide a great customer experience.
What This Dashboard Does
Using this dashboard, you can see things like:
- Memory/CPU usage, displayed in a graph detailing usage each hour
- Login rate per hour
- Google hits
- Client-side full page load
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- It is a great addition to using Google Analytics
- It lets you go beyond user activity and view your website performance stats
6. Wind Farm Dashboard
Wind farms, which are also called wind power plants, provide an environmentally friendly way to increase electricity. A wind power plant will have many wind turbines in one place to help create electricity.
What This Dashboard Does
The Wind Farm dashboard helps you visualize the performance of the wind farm. You can see things such as:
- The total average power, in watts, shown in a graph displaying data for the entire day
- The current power, in watts
- Turbine RPM at different hours of the day, shown in a line graph
- Current turbine RPM
- Current wind direction
- The latest wind speed
- Current wind quality (this is important for the full functionality of the wind turbines and the amount of electricity that can be produced from them)
- Most of the above data will be displayed for each turbine
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- It allows you to see if one turbine is not performing as well as the others
- It helps you track wind activity and quality
7. Floor Plan Dashboard
This dashboard is an example of how to use the Flowchart dashboard. The Flowchart dashboard can be used for many purposes, one of which is visualizing a house/floor plan.
This is just one example of the Flowchart dashboard.
What This Dashboard Does
You can quickly visualize a house’s entire floor. You can see all the different rooms and track the temperature in each room.
You can watch the temperature change over time. Clicking on each room will show you a little pop-up graph displaying that room’s temperature changes over time.
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- Building managers, including hospital managers, are able to keep track of what is going on in the building at all times
8. Enterprise Network Dashboard
This is another example of how to use the Flowchart dashboard to visualize a flowchart or setup.
What This Dashboard Does
This flowchart dashboard helps you visualize an enterprise network and how all parts are interconnected.
For example, You can see how everything starts from the head office, where the main router is. You will see which computers are connected to the main office and which router extensions are supplying internet to other computers.
You can also visualize your cloud setup and your service processing section.
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- This dashboard is simple
- It is easy to understand
- The dashboard makes it easy to comprehend layouts and workflows
9. Gardening Week Dashboard
Gardening Week is not about gardening or planting bushes and flowers. Instead, it is about “gardening” and looking for issues in your platform.
For example, you might be looking for bugs to fix.
What This Dashboard Does
You might use this dashboard to track your “gardening week” performance. For example, you can:
- See how many issues were opened
- See how many issues were closed
- View graphs showing how many issues were opened over time
- See how many issues are still currently open
- Check how many bugs are still open
- View a graph displaying trends for issues that need investigating
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- See if your “gardening week” is going as planned
- Get rid of bugs quickly
10. Hiveeyes Project
The Hiveeyes Project is a flexible beehive monitoring infrastructure platform and toolkit. It is open source and open hardware.
It is a DIY toolkit designed by a group of beekeepers from Berlin, Germany, who meet regularly in Berlin.
What This Dashboard Does
This Grafana dashboard (which is made visible to the public) visualizes weather changes in Germany. It focuses on weather changes that will be of importance to beekeepers in Germany.
Beekeepers will be able to see weather changes, temperatures, and more displayed in charts and graphs. They will be able to track weather changes in different areas that may affect beehives in those areas.
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- This dashboard allows beekeepers to get all the weather information they need in one place
- It is easy to understand and helps them track how bees will react
11. Prometheus Dashboard
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alert system.
It was originally built at Soundcloud but now has an active community that includes developers and users. It has been adopted by many companies, in many industries.
Some features of Prometheus include a multidimensional data model with time series data and pushing time series supported via an intermediary gateway.
What This Dashboard Does
Since Grafana integrates with Prometheus, you can create a Grafana dashboard that pulls data from Prometheus. You can create and configure a Prometheus data source in Grafana to populate your dashboard with data.
- You can create your own Prometheus graph in Grafana
- You can use one of the community shared Grafana dashboards that were designed for Prometheus data
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- It is an easy way to visualize Prometheus data
- The prebuilt shared dashboards make everything easier and quicker
12. Business Intelligence Dashboard
Grafana is a great tool to use to analyze and visualize your business metrics in one place. You can monitor IoT devices and application performance with a Grafana dashboard.
What This Dashboard Does
This dashboard allows you to:
- Monitor the performance of different divisions in your business
- See the separate metrics each division is tracking in one place
- Show stakeholders how well your business is doing in an easy to understand manner
- Track sales revenue to see if sales have gone up or down
- Track working capital to see what your capabilities are
- Analyze website traffic to see how well your SEO strategy is working
- Compare customer acquisition and customer retention to see where you are lacking and whether your marketing and/or loyalty programs can be improved
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- Businesses are able to optimize their SEO, marketing, and advertising strategies
- Businesses can learn whether customers are leaving them
- Different panels can be used for different divisions
To see an example of a business metrics dashboard and to learn more, check out this blog from Metric Fire.
13. Wikimedia Metrics Dashboard
Everyone knows what Wikipedia is, but not everyone knows they have a Grafana dashboard they use to track various data points.
What This Dashboard Does
The Wikimedia Metrics dashboard tracks different data sets.
- It tracks front end traffic
- It tracks the performance of Wikipedia continuously
- Some metrics that are tracked include the time it takes to submit and save an edit on a Wikipedia document
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- This is a useful look at what Wikipedia is tracking behind the scenes
- The sheer amount of data that Wikipedia tracks can be mind-boggling
14. Percona
Percona is a provider of unbiased open source database solutions. Grafana provides a Percona plugin that you can use to create several kinds of dashboards.
What This Dashboard Does
The Percona dashboard provides for MySQL performance and system monitoring. Some available dashboards include:
- Cross-server graphs
- Disk performance
- MySQL Performance Schema
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- It uses Prometheus datasource
- A live demo of a Percona dashboard can be viewed here
- You can go to Github to get started
15. Grafana Play Dashboard
The Grafana Play dashboard is a demo dashboard that you can play around with to get a feel for the Grafana interface.
What This Dashboard Does
This is not a specific dashboard. Instead, it allows you to figure out what using Grafana is like.
You can do things like:
- View different demo dashboards
- View and create playlists containing different dashboards
- Move panels around to customize demo dashboards
- See new features for Grafana
Main Benefits Of This Dashboard
- It is a great way to figure out how Grafana works and how you can use it to visualize data pertaining to your project, organization, or company
- You do not need to pay any money or even create an account to use this demo, making it very easy to use and accessible
- Grafana uses it to test new features and fixes
All You Need To Know About Using Grafana: Tips And Tricks
In this section, I will give you some important information you might want to know before getting started with Grafana. I will go over some tips and tricks, as well as different panel types you can add to dashboards.
How To Get Started With Grafana
Getting started with Grafana is easy – after you install Grafana and log in, create your first dashboard by clicking on the plus sign (+) on the left panel and then clicking on Create Dashboard. You will then click on Add New Panel to add your first panel (more on panels later).
How To Configure Grafana Dashboards
To create a new dashboard, you can click on the drop-down menu on the upper right side, which will bring up a list of your current dashboards and give you the ability to create a new one. You can also use this menu to manage Grafana playlists.
Grafana playlists are like music playlists – they contain different dashboards (you can add any dashboard to a playlist) which “play” one after the other.
When creating a new dashboard, click on Add Panel to add a panel to your dashboard with data pulled from your data source.
Your home dashboard will contain dashboards that you have starred. You can star any dashboard by clicking on the star icon at the top of the screen when viewing it.
You can screenshot any dashboard to capture the data presented on it. You can also share dashboards by clicking the Share button; this will create a link to the dashboard that you can send to colleagues.
Advanced settings can be managed in the Settings area. However, you can configure the time range of the dashboard by clicking on Time Range Controls, which should appear in the top right corner of your dashboard.
How To Use Panels
Each Grafana dashboard will have several panels, which can be moved around in different orders. Each panel can display a set of data, pulled from any data source.
Use the panels to organize the data you want your dashboard to display. Here are some of the most common types of panels you can use, according to Metric Fire:
- Graphs: Graphs display data over time. You have seen a number of graphs in the different dashboards shown in this article. For example, it can show CPU usage over time – you will see which hours CPU usage has peaked.
- Single Stat: You have also seen single stat panels, which display one stat only. For example, if you are tracking your gardening week performance, you might have a single stat panel that says how many issues remain open.
- Gauges: Gauges look like speedometers. A gauge panel also displays a single stat, but it adds a visualization factor. The speedometer visualization can help you see whether the stat is in the low or high range.
- Tables: These panels display data in a table form, which may be color-coded to help you visualize data.
- Alert list: The alert list panel shows you all alerts from the dashboard. For example, you can set up alerts displaying how many reviews were left on your profile.
You can group panels together by using rows to separate one group of panels from another. Rows are dividers that go in between panel groups.
Grafana Tutorials
Grafana has a number of tutorials that teach you how to use Grafana, even if you have no experience with the platform. There are tutorials on:
- The fundamentals of Grafana
- How to create users and teams in Grafana
- How to build a data source plugin
- How to build a panel plugin
- Running Grafana behind a reverse proxy
- And much more
To see the library of Grafana tutorials, go here.
You should also check out the Grafana documentation center. There, you can learn about:
- Installing Grafana on Windows, Mac, and Linux
- Getting started
- Creating dashboards
- Authentication
- Permissions
- Data sources
- And much more
Wrapping It Up
Not only businesses use Grafana, any organization or project manager can use Grafana to keep track of their project’s or organization’s performance and how well their team is getting along.
Using Grafana involves a learning curve, but it is well worth it.
Benjamin Levin is a digital marketing professional with 4+ years of experience with inbound and outbound marketing. He helps small businesses reach their content creation, social media marketing, email marketing, and paid advertising goals. His hobbies include reading and traveling.