Creating a custom dashboard #

It would be great if all our needs could be covered by existing dashboards. But, that is probably not the case. Each organization is “special” and our needs have to be reflected in our dashboards. Sometimes we can get away with dashboards made by others, and sometimes we need to change them. In other cases, we need to create our own dashboards. That’s what we’ll explore next.

Please click the + icon in the left-hand menu and choose to Create Dashboard. You’ll be presented with the choice of a few types of panels. Select Choose Visualization, you’ll be presented with the choice of a few types of panels. Select Graph.

Dashboard settings #

Before we define our first visualization, we’ll change a few dashboard settings. Please click the Settings icon in the top-right part of the screen.

Inside the General section, type the Name of the dashboard. If you are not inspired today, you can call it My Dashboard. Set the Tags to Prometheus and Kubernetes. You’ll have to press the enter key after typing each tag. Finally, change the Timezone to Local browser time.

Convert an alert into graph #

That was the boring part. Now let’s switch to something more interesting. We are about to convert one of the alerts we created in Prometheus into a graph. We’ll use the one that tells us the percentage of actual vs. reserved CPU. For that, we’ll need a few variables. To be more precise, we don’t really need them since we could hard-code the values. But, that would cause problems later on if we decide to change them. It is much easier to modify variables than to change the queries. ...