Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that transforms metrics, logs, and traces from multiple data sources into interactive dashboards and graphs. With over 35 million users worldwide, Grafana has become the de facto standard for observability visualization, supporting 150+ data source integrations including Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and cloud provider services. Grafana 13 (released April 2026 at GrafanaCON in Barcelona) introduced dynamic dashboards as generally available—with tabs, auto-grid layouts, and conditional rendering—alongside Git Sync GA for observability as code, the Grafana Advisor health-check tool, and Grafana Assistant AI access for all editions including OSS. Its core strength remains unified visualization: one dashboard can seamlessly combine metrics, logs, traces, and profiles across cloud providers and on-premise systems without switching tools.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 18 focused tables and 198 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Core Dashboard Components
Everything in Grafana is built from a small set of nested pieces, and knowing how they stack is the fastest way to feel at home. A dashboard holds panels, each panel pairs a query with a visualization, transformations reshape the data in between, and variables turn a one-off board into a reusable one. The newer additions — dynamic dashboards, library and saved-query reuse, and suggested templates — all extend this same core vocabulary.
| Component | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
New Dashboard → Add Panel → Query | • Top-level container for panels • supports variables, time ranges, and refresh intervals for dynamic data exploration. | |
Time Series panel with PromQL query | • Individual visualization unit combining a query and visualization type • basic building block of all dashboards. | |
rate(http_requests_total[5m]) | • Data retrieval expression using data source-specific syntax (PromQL, LogQL, SQL) • can combine multiple queries per panel. | |
Merge, Group by, Filter by value | • Data manipulation applied after query execution • reshapes, joins, calculates, or filters results before visualization. | |
$namespace, $server, $interval | • Dynamic placeholder that creates dropdown selectors • makes dashboards reusable across environments and resources. | |
Collapsible section grouping panels | • Organizational container for panels • can repeat based on variable values for dynamic dashboard sections. |