By Eleanor Bennett
Resources
12 min read
In our guide on the best Grafana dashboards examples, we wanted to show you some of the best ways you can use Grafana for a variety of different use cases across your organisation.
Whether you are a software architect or a lead DevOps engineer, Grafana is used to make analysis and data visualisation far easier to conduct for busy engineering and technical teams throughout the world.
What is a Grafana dashboard?
A Grafana dashboard provides a way of displaying metrics and log data in the form of visualisations and reporting dashboards.
Grafana provides a wide variety of ways to display your metrics data and includes the following visualisation formats: tables, timelines, time series, stat, gauge, bar and pie charts.
To show you how much you can do with Grafana dashboards we’ve collected the top twenty five open-source Grafana visualisations and reports to inspire you to get started with this leading data visualisation tool.
1. Server Monitoring
Credit: @Hector Smith
As the vast majority of Sysadmin’s realise, server monitoring is an essential part of monitoring the overall health of your environment.
This reporting dashboard uses a combination of Grafana, Prometheus & Node Exporter to allow you to pinpoint the root cause behind servers going down and enables you to take preemptive steps if you find you are running low on available disk space.
2. Lighthouse Metrics Report
Credit: @WikiMedia
Whilst many marketing specialists may not have much awareness of Grafana we think it is no excuse for not delving into its capabilities and experimenting, as this example above shows.
This dashboard displays all of the metrics that are included within Google’s own Lighthouse report and provides a way of being able to dive deeper into these metrics at any time without the need to perform a new audit from scratch.
3. Weather Forecast
Credit: @WeatherflowCollector
This Grafana dashboard example can be used to view weather conditions, upcoming forecasts, overall temperature & precipitation.
As this dashboard is hosted by Grafana's gallery you are free to experiment with the live dashboard within your browser, saving you from having to configure your own local setup to start improving your knowledge of this data visualisation tool.
Want to recreate this dashboard for yourself? Then check out the original creator’s Github repo.
4. Performance Testing
Credit: @Nigel Mulholland
Being able to conduct reliable performance testing is vital for assuring the quality of software that you are releasing to your users.
By putting workload and pressure against your system you can analyse if it behaves as expected or if you need to do further work to improve your code or scale up your operations to meet the demands of high traffic load
5. Monitoring Global ISP Latency
Credit: @Tehlo
This Grafana Dashboard uses InfluxDB and Telegraf to display the latency of over two hundred ISP endpoints from around the world.
The original creator of this intuitive dashboard created this as they host a gaming company and wanted to give their users the best possible experience by being able to explain that a
6. Windows Host Monitoring
Credit: @David Stephens
If you want to see the memory usage, processes, threats and CPU usage of your Window's hosts then you should consider using Grafana to create the dashboard above to give you full visibility into the performance of your Window's host.
This dashboard requires integration with Telegraf and Influxdb, otherwise, there will be panels that are not populated with data as a result.
7. OpenVPN Connection Monitoring
Credit: @Hassan Momin
As well as using Grafana, this dashboard also uses Prometheus to monitor OpenVPN connections. This report displays status, time since status update, data sent and received today alongside the number of users and clients.
If you want to have a go at creating your own monitoring service for OpenVPN then check out this guide.
8. Tracking Udemy Progress
Credit: @crashlaker
This unique report uses Loki alongside Grafana for tracking the user’s progress on completing their Udemy courses by percentage and daily progress.
This dashboard took an admirable degree of manual work by the original creator (as they encountered limits when using Udemy's official API for data scraping).
If you want to grab your own copy of this Grafana dashboard template then you may be waiting a while as the original creator hasn't linked their guide as of yet. As soon as they have, you can be sure that we'll add it to this post!
9. Fitbit Health Monitor
Credit: @Arpanghosh8453
The next dashboard in our list of the most ingenious ways to use Grafana uses the Fitbit API to pull together key metrics regarding heart health, activity, calories burnt and sleep quality of whoever is using the device being measured.
If you want to have a go at creating this dashboard for your own health and activity monitoring, then why not have a browse of the original Github repo?
10. TrueNAS Dashboard
Credit: @thinhla
TrueNAS is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) software that shares and protects data from modern-day threats like ransomware and malware.
This report captures the full performance of your TrueNas devices and displays key metrics including: location, uptime, current disk temperature, available disk space, disk busy and interface traffic levels.
11. Homelab Monitoring & Cost Analysis
Credit: @Tehlo
This homelab dashboard is in a league of its own and was one of our favourite uses of Grafana out of the examples we considered for this roundup.
This highly detailed visualisation centralises not only server and network statistics but also displays the gas and electricity costs associated with this comprehensive homelab setup.
If you want to get your hands on the template to create this homelab monitor for yourself then you’ll need to head on over to the Github repo for the project.
12. Forecasting Stocks
Credit: @Mikhail Volkov
This ingenious dashboard combines using the Redis Application plug-in with Grafana alongside Facebook's Prophet model to predict prices of stocks and forecast future cryptocurrency prices.
13. Docker Monitoring
Credit: @Nazar
Another one of Grafana’s key use cases is its capability for container monitoring as shown in the example above regarding Docker monitoring.
The view configured above displays the following essential metrics with clarity: total running containers, total memory usage, total CPU usage, network RX & network TX.
When it comes to avoiding container bottlenecks, monitoring is the best safeguard you can have to ensure visibility of the performance of your containerised applications and overall infrastructure.
14. SSL Expiry Tracker
Credit: @Jorge de la Cruz
If you own numerous domains then you might quickly find that monitoring the validity of all of your SSL certificates to be quite tedious and you may require a dashboard to improve your visibility of when your certificates are due to expire.
This SSL monitoring dashboard uses Grafana & InfluxDB to show you which certificates are valid, which are expiring soon and which ones have already expired (and by how many days).
By proactively monitoring your SSL certificates you can take further steps to avoid outages and subsequent loss of revenue and damage to your brand's reputation as a result of not being available to your customers.
15. AWS Billing Estimator
Credit: @Monitoring Artist
As AWS billing is often known for being quite hard to predict, we are sure that many AWS users will find the Grafana dashboard above to be a good workaround for estimating their monthly and daily charges.
This view also splits out individual AWS services by cost, allowing you to see charges for S3, EC2, Glue & Kinesis side by side.
16. Kubernetes Cluster Monitoring
Credit: @Pivotal Observability
If you are a developer that already uses Kubernetes, then you’ll know firsthand just how important it is to actively monitor Kubernetes clusters to ensure that resources are being used efficiently.
For this use case, Grafana provides an alternative Kubernetes dashboard for analysing which nodes are contributing to workload bottlenecks and see metrics relating to pod CPU usage, network I/O pressure and memory usage split out by pod.
17. GitLab CI Pipeline Status
Credit: @Mvisonneau
In case you were not already familiar with all of GitLab's key features then you might not know that they provide a continuous integration service that builds and tests code as you push it to the application.
If you already use GitLab CI or wish to get started with this feature then you may soon find the Grafana dashboard we’ve included above useful. This dashboard displays total pipelines, any failures, pipeline runs within the last hour, successfully completed jobs and the average pipeline runtime duration.
If you are new to using Gitlab or have only used Github in the past then why not check out our expert-led review comparing Github vs Gitlab?
18. Kong Monitoring
Credit: @KongHQ
Kong is a popular API gateway that serves as middleware and extends the capabilities of APIs through the use of additional plugins.
This dashboard example allows you to visualise total requests per second (RPS), requests per service, Kong memory usage by Node as well as Nginx connection states shown by time-series graph.
19. Alertmanager Visualisation
Credit: @Shubham Choudhary
When the creator of this dashboard was tired of manually searching for specific alerts through Slack, teams & emails they soon found out that there was a far better way of displaying this information concisely using Grafana and Prometheus.
By using Alertmanager's API as a data source for Grafana the software engineer behind this tutorial was able to bypass using the default Alertmanager UI.
As a result of implementing this reporting dashboard, the cognitive load was reduced among the team and it also made prioritising highly important errors easier which assisting in reducing the organisation's overall MTTR (mean time to recovery).
20. Monitoring Spring Boot Microservices
Credit: @Firas Messaoudi
In our next example of a dashboard that uses Grafana alongside Prometheus, we've found a great example of how you can get started with monitoring your Spring Boot microservices.
Spring Boot is a popular choice for developers that wish to create production-ready applications swiftly, so we are sure that many of our readers will find this animated tutorial helpful to your next microservice led project.
If you are new to the concept of microservices then why not check out our article on Microservices vs APIs?
21. Spark Streaming Monitoring
Credit: @Dima Statz
Software architects can use this Grafana dashboard alongside Prometheus to monitor streaming from Apache Spark on Kubernetes.
This dashboard can be used to provide a monitoring and alerting alternative to those who are used to using managed solutions such as AWS EMR or Azure Databricks but wish to build their own in-house reporting solution.
Want to get started with creating your own Grafana dashboards? Then sign up today for our managed Grafana platform and start creating dashboards within minutes with our 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
22. HDD Temperature Monitor
Credit: @anywhoever
Hardware specialists state that the average HDD temperature should be around 35 Celcius, so if your set-up is often far hotter than this you may wish to invest in a solution that offers hard drive cooling.
It is one thing knowing what temperature you should meet but dynamically monitoring all of your HDDs is another use case for monitoring entirely. This Grafana dashboard provides clarity and awareness to the user to let them know if they should be concerned with the current state of their hardware’s temperature.
23. Nextcloud Audit Log Dashboard
Credit: @tvojamatka
If you are looking to monitor the activity of your Nextcloud server, then hopefully our next Grafana dashboard will inspire you to get started with reporting on the metrics that matter to your system's performance.
As you can see from the preview above, this forensic dashboard captures total logins, total uploaded files, total shared files, as well as total failed logins and total accessed files.
For this dashboard to work, this setup requires integration with Loki and Promtail, the latter of these integrations aids with the collection of logs, much like how Logstash works as part of the ELK Stack.
24. Strava Monitoring Dashboard
Credit: @Grafana Labs
For another health and wellness-themed addition to this list, we’ve found an example dashboard that displays usage metrics from the popular cycling and running platform Strava.
As this dashboard is yet another example dashboard that is hosted by Grafana's gallery you are also free to download this visualisation to experiment with and configure for use on your own machine.
25. Monitoring Linux Processes
Credit: @SCHKN
This reporting dashboard uses Prometheus in addition to Grafana to monitor Linux machine processes. This monitoring dashboard is likely to be useful to both DevOps and Linux system administrators and anyone else whose role values tracking server performance metrics.
This report helps to highlight which of your instances are running too slowly, as well as also displaying unresponsive instances that have happened as a result of unresolved bottlenecks.
If you wish to attempt creating this dashboard for yourself then you may wish to follow the steps outlined in this tutorial.
Have a unique Grafana use case you would like to see us cover for this article? Then feel free to get in touch with your idea via email at [email protected].
If you enjoyed this post then why not check out our guide to the best Kibana dashboard examples or our previous post on SIEM tools?