Begin creating any new dashboard by adding cards, or panels. Dashboard cards serve the following purposes:

• Data visualization: Each card displays specific information, such as a charts, graphs, or tables. You can choose the type of visualization that best suits your needs.
• Interactive exploration: Cards are not static; you can hover over elements to see details, drill down into the underlying raw data for deeper investigation, or pivot from the card to create Worksheets or Monitors.
• Flexible layout: You can freely arrange and resize cards within a dashboard to create a logical flow of information.
• Customization: Cards can be configured with specific titles, time ranges, and filters. You can also configure dashboard parameters to filter all cards by specific values.

How to add a card

This workflow describes how you can add a new card to a new dashboard. There are other ways to add cards to a dashboard, such as asking AI SRE to generate a chart and then adding the chart to a dashboard.

1. Click Dashboards in the left navigation rail.

2. On the Dashboard Explorer, click New dashboard.

3. Click Add cards. You can add a card containing a table, visualization, or other object such a section, text, or image to design the layout of your dashboard. In this example, we'll add a card containing a log visualization.

4. Select Logs in the Visualization category.

   

5. Select the Dataset you want to use for this card. This determines where the data in the card comes from. Since dashboards can have multiple cards, each with its own source data, your dashboard can represent data from any number of logs, spans, metrics, or other Datasets. In this example, we'll select the Kubernetes Logs Dataset.

   

6. Use the query builder to do some additional shaping and filtering of the data you want to see. This chart shows the total number of events, we want to see the events sorted by container. In the Group by drop-down, we select container.

   

7. At the top of the chart, click Untitled query and give this card a name, such as K8s events by container.

8. Click Apply to add this card to the dashboard.

   

9. Give your dashboard a name, then click Save changes to save and create the dashboard.

You can continue adding cards in this manner. In the example below, we add a Dataset table and a text card summarizing the contents of the dashboard.

To add a Dataset table, perform the following steps:

1. Click Add card.
2. Select Dataset in the Tables category.
3. Select the Dataset you want to use. In our example, we select only the Kubernetes Logs from our staging cluster, and name the card Staging logs.

To add a text card, perform the following steps:

1. Click Add card.
2. Select Text in the Objects category.
3. Use Markdown and some formatting options in the UI to create the text you want.

After you create multiple cards, you can drag and drop them to rearrange the order and layout.

Edit dashboard cards

When editing a dashboard, hover on any dashboard card and click the pencil icon () to edit the card definition.

When viewing a dashboard (not in edit mode), click the vertical ellipsis icon (), then click Edit card to edit any dashboard card.

Edit multiple dashboard cards

Use the Manage all queries option when editing a dashboard to open an editor page similar to Worksheets, where you can edit multiple cards at once, along with more advanced settings.

Below are some important workflows available in this multi-card edit mode:

• Bulk query editing. View and modify the underlying OPAL queries for multiple dashboard cards simultaneously, rather than one by one.
• Advanced configuration. Access more granular settings for individual cards, such as hiding specific queries from the dashboard view without deleting them.
• Centralized workflow: Navigate through all the data stages and inputs that power your dashboard visualizations in a single, cohesive view.

Click the ellipsis icon () to get access to the following additional options:

Click Manage card layout to return to the default card layout screen when editing a dashboard.

Manage and pivot from dashboard cards

Hover on any dashboard the click the vertical ellipsis icon () to access additional options. The options differ slightly depending on whether you are viewing or editing your dashboard.