Creating your first dashboard

Dashboards are a medium to communicate important and sometimes urgent information to consumers. Before we delve into design techniques and best practices, let’s get familiar with the Grafana user interface to start with a simple dashboard. The demo application we have worked with throughout this book has a frontend store; let’s look at the requests we get for its shopping cart.

To create your first panel and dashboard, follow these steps:

1. In your Grafana instance, select Explore in the menu.
2. Choose your Prometheus data source; this will be labeled as grafanacloud-<team>-prom (default).
3. In the Metric dropdown, choose app_frontend_requests_total (the metric count of requests to the frontend app), and in the Label filters dropdown, choose target = /api/cart as the filter (to restrict the results to the cart API only), and then click on Run query. You should see data like this:

Figure 8...