3.1.3 "Exploring" Your New Aggregate Data

What

Before you build a formal Grafana panel, it often helps to look at the aggregated data directly. The Explore view is the fastest way to sanity-check what your report is producing.

When/Why

Use Explore after you have configured the Prometheus scrape and want to confirm the metric looks right before turning it into a panel.

How

Aggregated inventory-query data is exposed in Dashboard metrics as filewave_inventory_query_<id>, where <id> is the report ID you used. The attached video shows the Explore workflow for one of those metrics.

In this example, the data is no longer shown as five separate records. Instead, it has been grouped into three records because only three different FileWave client versions are present across the endpoints. That grouped result is much easier to use when you build a chart, such as a pie chart, in the next step.