Glancing at the sidebar menu

Let's take a look at the more common sidebar menu buttons. Unless you are running Grafana in a special display mode, this menu bar will appear alongside your dashboard. Depending on the context, it may be accompanied by additional buttons, but we will look at the basic set.

The dashboards button

At the top of the dashboard is the dashboards button:

It displays the name of the current dashboard, and clicking on it takes you to the same dashboard search page as the search button described in the following section.

The dashboard panels

Below the dashboards button are the dashboard panels. Besides graphical data, panels can convey a wide variety of information, including textual and numerical data, spreadsheet-like tables, and lists of dashboards. The current Home dashboard serves as a landing page for the Grafana application by default, but you can always change the default to be any dashboard of your choosing.

The dashboard settings and view mode

At the upper right of the Home dashboard is a small gear icon that represents the dashboard settings button. Clicking on this button gives you access to a wide array of settings for the dashboard. Some of the main functions available from the settings page are as follows:

• General settings
• Annotations
• Variables
• Links
• JSON model

We will cover most of these settings in Chapter 8, Working with Advanced Dashboard Features.

To the right of the dashboard settings icon is the view mode icon. Clicking on this button cycles through three visual modes for the Grafana application, as follows:

• Dashboard and side menu
• Dashboard only—hides the side menu
• Kiosk mode