3.1.4 Creating your Data Panel

What

Once your aggregated metric is available in Grafana, you can turn it into a panel that answers the question you actually care about.

When/Why

Pick the visualization based on the story the data needs to tell. Pie charts work well for a current distribution, such as how many devices are on each client version right now. Line or bar charts are better when you want to watch that same data change over time.

How

Creating the panel is similar to the earlier dashboard examples, but now you are working with aggregated Prometheus data instead of a simple raw query result. The video below shows the basic workflow.

Grafana gives you a lot of freedom in how a panel is presented. One small detail that helps immediately is the legend format. In this example, using {{genericdesktopclient__filewave_client_version}} makes the legend display the actual version value instead of a less useful raw field name.

We chose Instant in this example because the goal is a current snapshot, which is usually the right choice for a pie chart. If you want to see the same metric trend over time, use a visualization such as a bar or line chart and query the time-series data instead.