Using 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.

This topic provides an overview of dashboard features and shortcuts, and describes how to use dashboard search.

Features

You can use dashboards to customize the presentation of your data in the following ways.

Feature	Description
1. Home	Click the Grafana home icon to be redirected to the home page configured in the Grafana instance.
2. Title	When you click the dashboard title, you can search for dashboard contained in the current folder.
3. Sharing a dashboard	Use this option to share the current dashboard by link or snapshot. You can also export the dashboard definition from the share modal.
4. Adding a new panel	Use this option to add a panel, dashboard row, or library panel to the current dashboard.
5. Dashboard settings	Use this option to change dashboard name, folder, and tags and manage variables and annotation queries. For more information about dashboard settings, see Modifying dashboard settings.
6. Time picker dropdown	Click to select relative time range options and set custom absolute time ranges. You can change the Timezone and fiscal year settings from the time range controls by clicking the Change time settings button. Time settings are saved on a per-dashboard basis.
7. Zooming out time range	Click to zoom out the time range. For more information about how to use time range controls, see Setting dashboard time range.
8. Refreshing dashboard	Click to immediately trigger queries and refresh dashboard data.
9. Refreshing dashboard time interval	Click to select a dashboard auto refresh time interval.
10. View mode	Click to display the dashboard on a large screen such as a TV or a kiosk. View mode hides irrelevant information such as navigation menus.
11. Dashboard panel	The primary building block of a dashboard is the panel. To add a new panel, dashboard row, or library panel, click Add panel. Library panels can be shared among many dashboards. To move a panel, drag the panel header to another location. To resize a panel, click and drag the lower right corner of the panel.
12. Graph legend	Change series colors, y-axis, and series visibility directly from the legend.
13. Dashboard search	Click Search to search for dashboards by name or panel title.
14. Dashboard row	A dashboard row is a logical divider within a dashboard that groups panels together. Rows can be collapsed or expanded allowing you to hide parts of the dashboard. Panels inside a collapsed row do not issue queries. Use repeating rows to create rows dynamically based on a template variable.

Keyboard shortcuts

Grafana has a number of keyboard shortcuts available. To display all keyboard shortcuts available to you, press ? or h on your keyboard.

• Ctrl+S saves the current dashboard.

• f opens the dashboard finder/search.

• d+k toggles kiosk mode (hides the menu).

• d+e expands all rows.

• d+s opens dashboard settings.

• Ctrl+K opens the command palette.

• Esc exits panel when in fullscreen view or edit mode. Also returns you to the dashboard from the dashboard settings.

Focused panel

To use shortcuts targeting a specific panel, hover over a panel with your pointer.

• e toggles panel edit view

• v toggles panel fullscreen view

• ps opens panel share feature

• pd duplicates panel

• pr removes panel

• pl toggles panel legend

Setting dashboard time range

Grafana provides several ways to manage the time ranges of the data being visualized, for dashboard, panels and also for alerting.

This section describes supported time units and relative ranges, the common time controls, dashboard-wide time settings, and panel-specific time settings.

Time units and relative ranges

Grafana supports the following time units: s (seconds), m (minutes), h (hours), d (days), w (weeks), M (months), Q (quarters), and y (years).

The minus operator enables you to step back in time, relative to now. If you want to display the full period of the unit (day, week, or month), append /<time unit> to the end. To view fiscal periods, use fQ (fiscal quarter) and fy (fiscal year) time units.

The plus operator enables you to step forward in time, relative to now. For example, you can use this feature to look at predicted data in the future.

The following table provides example relative ranges.

Example relative range	From	To
Last 5 minutes	now-5m	now
The day so far	now/d	now
This week	now/w	now/w
This week so far	now/w	now
This month	now/M	now/M
This month so far	now/M	now
Previous Month	now-1M/M	now-1M/M
This year so far	now/Y	now
This Year	now/Y	now/Y
Previous fiscal year	now-1y/fy	now-1y/fy

Note

Grafana Alerting does not support now+n for future timestamps and now-1n/n for start of n until end of n timestamps.

Common time range controls

The dashboard and panel time controls have a common user interface. The following describes common time range controls.

• Current time range, also called the time picker, shows the time range currently displayed in the dashboard or panel you are viewing. Hover your cursor over the field to see the exact time stamps in the range and their source (such as the local browser). Click the current time range to change it. You can change the current time using a relative time range, such as the last 15 minutes, or an absolute time range, such as 2020-05-14 00:00:00 to 2020-05-15 23:59:59.

• The relative time range can be selected from the Relative time ranges list. You can filter the list using the input field at the top. Some examples of time ranges include Last 30 minutes, Last 12 hours, Last 7 days, Last 2 years, Yesterday, Day before yesterday, This day last week, Today so far, This week so far, and This month so far.

• Absolute time range can be set in two ways: Typing exact time values or relative time values into the From and To fields and clicking Apply time range, or clicking a date or date range from the calendar displayed when you click the From or To field. To apply your selections, click Apply time range.

Other time range features

1. To zoom out, click Cmd+Z or Ctrl+Z. Click the icon to view a larger time range in the dashboard or panel visualization.

2. To use the zoom in feature, click and drag to select the time range in the visualization that you want to view.

Note

Zooming in is only applicable to graph visualizations.

Refresh dashboards

Click the Refresh dashboard icon to immediately run every query on the dashboard and refresh the visualizations. Grafana cancels any pending requests when you trigger a refresh.

By default, Grafana does not automatically refresh the dashboard. Queries run on their own schedule according to the panel settings. However, if you want to regularly refresh the dashboard, then click the down arrow next to the Refresh dashboard icon and then select a refresh interval.

Control the time range using a URL

You can control the time range of a dashboard by providing the following query parameters in the dashboard URL.

• from defines the lower limit of the time range, specified in ms epoch, or relative time.

• to defines the upper limit of the time range, specified in ms epoch, or relative time.

• time and time.window defines a time range from time-time.window/2 to time+time.window/2. Both parameters should be specified in ms. For example ?time=1500000000000&time.window=10000 results in 10s time range from 1499999995000 to 1500000005000.