Touring the Grafana panel UI

Here is a typical Grafana panel in edit mode:

Figure 3.1 – The edit panel UI

The panel’s UI can be broken down into roughly three main functional areas as demarcated in the preceding screenshot:

1. Panel display: A preview display and a time picker
2. Options settings: The panel visualization type, styles, and links
3. Panel tabs: Data query, data transformation, and alerting

Throughout this chapter, we will delve into each of these areas. First, we will look at the Query tab in the context of how to use it to produce graphed data. Then, we will explore how the various panel settings shape the look of the graph and how to set typical panel display features, such as a title. Finally, we will see how the Alert tab can establish monitoring rules for thresholds that, when exceeded, can trigger alerts. Of course, all of this is dependent on what we’ll create first – a simple data source...