3.1.4 Creating your Data Panel

What

NowOnce thatyour weaggregated havemetric ouris dataavailable beingin passedGrafana, over to the dashboard, and we know how to access it, weyou can buildturn it into a panel usingthat answers the visualizationquestion thatyou fitsactually ourcare data.about.

When/Why

ManyPick times,the whenvisualization based on the story the data weneeds to tell. Pie charts work well for a current distribution, such as how many devices are presentingon iseach representingclient theversion "whole"right ofnow. anLine environment,or thenbar wecharts mightare choose to use a pie chart to represent that data, and usually that data is presented in a snapshot form (i.e. only the latest data).  At other times,better when weyou want to watch thethat progression of something, such as number of enrolled devices, we might want to look at thatsame data as it progresseschange over time in a line graph.time.

How

Creating this newthe panel isn'tis muchsimilar harderto thanthe ourearlier previousdashboard example,examples, but therenow you are working with aggregated Prometheus data instead of a fewsimple newraw thingsquery you'llresult. noticeThe invideo below shows the overviewbasic below:workflow.

ThereGrafana aregives lotsyou a lot of options you can play around withfreedom in thehow differenta visualizationspanel tois customizepresented. One small detail that helps immediately is the outputlegend (we won't attempt here to document that).  Note though that you can reference data elements for things like the legend. format. In this caseexample, puttingusing {{genericdesktopclient__filewave_client_version}} in as the legend format makes the legend usedisplay the muchactual moreversion meaningfulvalue instead of a less useful raw field value. name.

One more note: We chose the "Instant" optionInstant in this caseexample because wethe onlygoal is a current snapshot, which is usually the right choice for a pie chart. If you want to see the lastsame versionmetric oftrend theover datatime, for this particular panel (and almost always "instant" foruse a pievisualization chart).such  However, the data really is time-series data, soas a bar or line chart couldand showquery thesethe time-series data elements changing over time to watch progression.instead.