Creating Dashboards

Dashboards are created in Grafana. This page will provide a minimal tutorial on creating a simple chart. Once you’ve created your first chart, explore the many internet Grafana resources.

Navigate to Grafana (which is typically hosted on port 3000) and then hover over the + and select the Dashboard link.

Open

Select the panel option:

Open

Start typing connexion_ into the metric browser textbox. A list of available metrics should popup, matching the list of enabled metrics within Connexion. Remember, you may need to start your channel and process a few messages in order for the metric to be created. Notice how Grafana displays the name, description, and type also displayed in Connexion.

Select your metric and navigate to the next field in Grafana (moving the focus away from the metric browser will run the query). Grafana may make some suggestions based on the type of metric you’re using. In this case, Grafana suggested the addition of the rate function, which turns an always-increasing metric into a delta chart.

The title was updated, as well as the legend. In this case, we want to use the value of the Channel label as the legend. Grafana syntax for this is {{LegendName}}. We could also have entered {{Group}} / {{Tab}} / {{Channel}} for the full channel path.

Setting the Units option will automatically format the Y-axis:

Save and Apply your chart (top-right corner), and voila! Your first chart.

Grafana has a ton of functionality and many different chart types. Explore the dashboards included with Connexion and the many online examples.