Managing dashboards

This documentation topic is designed for Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 9.x.

For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 10.x, see Working in Grafana version 10.

For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 8.x, see Working in Grafana version 8.

A dashboard is a set of one or more panels that visually presents your data in one or more rows.

For more information about creating dashboards, see Add and organize panels.

Creating dashboard folders

Folders help you organize and group dashboards, which is useful when you have many dashboards or multiple teams using the same Grafana instance.

Prerequisites

Ensure that you have Grafana Admin permissions. For more information about dashboard permissions, see Dashboard permissions.

To create a dashboard folder

1. Sign in to Grafana and on the side menu, click Dashboards > New folder

2. Enter a unique name and click Create.

Note

When you save a dashboard, you can either select a folder for the dashboard to be saved in or create a new folder.

Managing dashboards and folders

On the Manage dashboards and folders page, you can:

• Create a folder

• Create a dashboard

• Move dashboards into folders

• Delete multiple dashboards

• Navigate to a folder page where you can assign folder and dashboard permissions

Dashboard folder page

You can complete the following tasks on the Dashboard Folder page:

• Move or delete dashboards in a folder.

• Rename a folder (available under the Settings tab).

• Assign permissions to folders (which are inherited by the dashboards in the folder).

To navigate to the dashboard folder page, click the cog appears when you hover over a folder in the dashboard search result list or the Manage dashboards and folders page.

Dashboard permissions

You can assign permissions to a folder. Any permissions you assign are inherited by the dashboards in the folder. An Access Control List (ACL) is used where Organization Role, Team, and a User can be assigned permissions.

See permissions for more information.

Exporting and importing dashboards

You can use the Grafana UI or the HTTP API to export and import dashboards.

Exporting a dashboard

The dashboard export action creates a Grafana JSON file that contains everything you need, including layout, variables, styles, data sources, queries, and so on, so that you can later import the dashboard.

Note

Grafana downloads a JSON file to your local machine.

1. Open the dashboard that you want to export.

2. Select the share icon.

3. Choose Export.

4. Choose Save to file.

Making a dashboard portable

If you want to export a dashboard for others to use, you can add template variables for things like a metric prefix (use a constant variable) and server name.

A template variable of the type Constant will automatically be hidden in the dashboard, and will also be added as a required input when the dashboard is imported.

Importing a dashboard

1. Choose Dashboards in the side menu.

2. Choose New, then select Import from the dropdown menu.

3. Perform one of the following steps.

   • Upload a dashboard JSON file.

   • Paste a Grafana.com dashboard URL.

   • Paste dashboard JSON text directly into the text area.

   The import process enables you to change the name of the dashboard, pick the data source you want the dashboard to use, and specify any metric prefixes (if the dashboard uses any).

Troubleshooting dashboards

This section provides information to help you solve common dashboard problems.

Dashboard is slow

If your dashboard is slow, consider the following:

• Are you trying to render dozens (or hundreds or thousands) of time-series on a graph? This can cause the browser to lag. Try using functions like highestMax (in Graphite) to reduce the returned series.

• Sometimes the series names can be very large. This causes larger response sizes. Try using alias to reduce the size of the returned series names.

• Are you querying many time-series or for a long range of time? Both of these conditions can cause Grafana or your data source to pull in a lot of data, which can slow it down.

• It could be high load on your network infrastructure. If the slowness isn’t consistent, this might be the problem.

Dashboard refresh rate issues

By default, Grafana queries your data source every 30 seconds. Setting a low refresh rate on your dashboards puts unnecessary stress on the backend. In many cases, querying this frequently isn’t necessary because the data isn’t being sent to the system such that changes would be seen.

If you have this issue, the following solutions are recommended.

• Do not enable auto-refreshing on dashboards, panels, or variables unless you need it. Users can refresh their browser manually, or you can set the refresh rate for a time period that makes sense (such as very ten minutes or every hour).

• If it is required, then set the refresh rate to once a minute. Users can always refresh the dashboard manually.

• If your dashboard has a longer time period (such as one week), then automated refreshing might not be necessary.

Handling or rendering null data is wrong or confusing

Some applications publish data intermittently. For example, they only post a metric when an event occurs. By default, Grafana graphs connect lines between the data points.