[New Webinar] Grafana 101 Part III: Interactivity, Templating and Sharing

Avthar Sewrathan -

Take your dashboards to the next level with step-by-step demos, queries, and pro tips that’ll get you creating interactive, reusable, and shareable Grafana dashboards in less time.

In our Guide to Grafana series, we’ve tackled how to create awesome visualizations like graphs, world maps, and gauges, and how to set up alerts that notify us about anomalies and when things go wrong in the metrics we care about.

The next step is to create dashboards that allow us and our teammates to drill into specific details, get the info we need quickly, and use templated visualizations and queries, instead of starting from scratch every time.

In Guide to Grafana 101 Part III: Getting Started with Interactivity, Templating and Sharing, I’ll take you from zero to hero in using Grafana variables and templates to create more interactive and insightful dashboards for your stakeholders – and how to save those visualizations for others (or you) to use in other dashboards.

  • RSVP to join me on June 17th at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 4pm GMT.
  • Can’t make that time? I’ll send the recording and resources to all registrants, so RSVP anyway.

Dashboards aren’t just for those who build them

Those of us that work with data often want to make useful dashboards that make it easier for ourselves, our team, and our organization to make sense of and get insight about the data we collect.

We touched on this in “Grafana 101: How to Build (awesome) Visualizations,” but two common problems I’ve run into, both when creating dashboards and using them as a stakeholder:

  • Stakeholders who aren’t familiar with the underlying system architecture are unable to interact or filter visualizations, which leaves them unable to answer their questions.
  • Engineers get stakeholder requests to write new code or change the underlying queries powering the dashboard.

Moreover, building dashboarding for complex systems with many components, like apps composed of microservices, is time-consuming and involves a lot of repetition, such as creating graphs for the same metric on different servers.

In my upcoming Guide to Grafana session, I’ll show you how to use Grafana variables and templates to overcome these issues. You’ll learn how to build more interactive and insightful dashboards for your stakeholders, while also reducing repetitive work. In summary: better dashboards, in less time.

What you'll learn

As always, I’ll focus on code and step-by-step live demos.

We’ll use two scenarios: monitoring an app, composed of microservices and running in Kubernetes (multiple servers where we want to visualize the same metric) and monitoring the live location of buses in New York City (where we want to share dashboards with teammates).

I’ll take you through creating variables and using them in your dashboards to make them more interactive, as well as saving templates for canonical queries and visualizations to reuse in other dashboards and share with your organization.

More specifically, you’ll:

  • Get a quick overview of what, when, and why to template your dashboards
  • Learn the difference between a template and a variable
  • Create different types of variables, like query and custom
  • Create dynamic dashboards that will save you time when you’re dashboarding large projects
  • See template examples for DevOps and IoT Monitoring datasets
  • Set up version control and share your dashboards with teammates
  • Hear pro tips and recommendations to customize and apply what you learn to your own projects
Sneak peak of creating an interactive dashboard to monitor IoT devices

My goal is that you leave the session with an understanding of when, why, and how to use variables and templates in your Grafana dashboards, as well as the resources you need to integrate them into your own setup.

Myself and other Timescale Grafana experts will be available to answer questions and share resources throughout the session, so you leave ready to continue mastering Grafana.

I hope to see you there – but, as I mentioned, sign up even if you’re unable to attend live. I'll send you the resources and recording and happily answer any questions 1:1.

Want to explore Grafana in the meantime? Check out our in-depth tutorials and quickstarts.

See you soon!