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. First use Exploring Your New Aggregate Data to check its labels and counts against the source FileWave report. You need Read-Write Dashboard access to create and save the panel.

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

Create or edit a panel on the intended dashboard and select its Prometheus data source, not FileWave Tabular Datasource. Enter the same metric you checked in Explore, using your report ID. The recording uses filewave_inventory_query_41; 41 is an example, not an ID to copy into every environment.

Choose a pie chart for the grouped version counts, set the legend to the label described below, and select Instant for a snapshot. Give the panel a meaningful title, save the dashboard, then reopen it and compare the displayed groups and counts with the result from Explore. If no data appears, return to the linked Explore troubleshooting steps rather than treating an empty chart as zero devices.

The retained video demonstrates this workflow in an older Grafana interface; its sample Client versions are historical, not current support guidance.

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 snapshot, which is usually the right choice for a pie chart. An Instant query evaluates the expression at the end of the selected time range: if that range ends in the past, the result is historical, not the current device distribution. Use a range ending now when you want the latest collected values. To see the metric trend over time, use a line or bar chart with a Range query. Grafana explains the distinction in its Prometheus query options.