A Better Dashboard for Big Screens
Explore how to design a monitoring dashboard optimized for big screens using Grafana and Prometheus. Understand the use of semaphores for quick alerts, how to interpret dashboard signals, and navigate from alerts to detailed graphs. This lesson helps you set up a visual system to monitor Kubernetes clusters efficiently and respond swiftly to potential issues.
We explored how to create a dashboard with a graph and a single stat (semaphore). Both are based on similar queries, and the significant difference is in the way they display the results. We’ll assume that the primary purpose of the dashboard we started building is available on a big screen, visible to many, and not as something we keep open on our laptops. At least, not continuously.
Importing a dashboard #
What should be the primary purpose of such a dashboard? Before I answer that question, we’ll import a dashboard I created for this chapter.
Please click the + button from the left-hand menu and select Import. Type 9132 as the Grafana.com Dashboard and press the Load button. Select a Prometheus data source. Feel free to change any of the values to suit your needs. Nevertheless, you might want to postpone that until you get more familiar with the dashboard. In any case, click the Import button once you’re finished.
Configuration of resources in our cluster #
You are likely to see one ...