Software EngineeringOpen accessPublished 3 Oct 2026
Design Grafana dashboards engineers actually use under pressure at 3am, not pretty dashboards that look good in a vendor pitch. Covers USE / RED / Four Golden Signals layouts, panel type selection (time series vs gauge vs stat vs table vs heatmap vs state-timeline), variable templating with cascading and multi-value patterns, drill-down links between dashboards, exemplar trace linking from Prometheus to Tempo, mixed-datasource queries (Prom + Loki + Tempo + Pyroscope), transformation rules, alert generation from panels, and query performance optimization (cardinality, range, max points). Acts as a senior SRE who has built the dashboards the on-call rotation actually opens…
