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Grafana Dashboard Design

We design meaningful Grafana dashboards, service RED metrics, SLO error budget panels, and infrastructure overviews, stored as code in Git, with variables for multi-cluster navigation and deployment annotations.

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Problems we solve

  • Default Grafana dashboards show cluster-level metrics but nothing meaningful about your applications
  • Engineers build dashboards from scratch on every new service, no shared standards or templates
  • Business stakeholders need SLO dashboards but engineers only have infra metrics
  • Dashboards not in version control, deleted or accidentally modified with no recovery
  • Panels use raw PromQL that nobody can read or maintain six months later

What's included

Dashboard audit: consolidate, remove noise, and identify coverage gaps
Service-level dashboard template: RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) per service
Infrastructure dashboards: Kubernetes nodes, pods, PVCs, namespaces
SLO/SLI dashboards with error budget burn rate panels
Business metrics dashboards (connected to your app metrics via custom exporters)
Dashboard-as-code with Grafonnet or JSON stored in Git
Dashboard variables for multi-cluster, multi-namespace navigation
Annotations for deployments and incidents auto-populated from ArgoCD/GitHub Actions

Our approach

  1. 01

    Metric and dashboard audit

    We review existing dashboards, identify gaps (which services have no coverage), and classify panels by usefulness. Redundant and noisy dashboards are archived.

  2. 02

    RED metric baseline

    For every HTTP service, we instrument Rate (req/s), Errors (5xx rate), and Duration (p50/p95/p99 latency). These become the foundation of all service dashboards.

  3. 03

    Dashboard templates

    We build parameterised dashboard templates using Grafana variables. One template covers all services; you pick the service from a dropdown. Changes to the template propagate to all instances.

  4. 04

    SLO dashboards

    We define SLIs (e.g. 99.9% of requests succeed and complete in under 500ms) and build error budget dashboards showing how much of your monthly budget is burned and at what rate.

  5. 05

    Dashboard-as-code and CI

    All dashboards are exported as JSON or Grafonnet and stored in Git. A CI job validates them on every PR. Dashboard changes require a PR review before they reach production Grafana.

Tech stack

GrafanaPrometheusGrafonnet / Jsonnetkube-state-metricsnode-exporterAlertmanagerOpenTelemetrycustom Prometheus exporters

Results

We publish results only when a client has approved them. See how we publish case studies and a sample report.

FAQ

What are RED metrics?
RED stands for Rate (requests per second), Errors (number of failed requests), and Duration (distribution of request latencies). Coined by Tom Wilkie at Weaveworks, RED gives you a user-focused view of service health with just three metric families.
What is an SLO dashboard?
An SLO (Service Level Objective) dashboard tracks your error budget, how much reliability you have left in a rolling window (usually 30 days). It shows current SLI value, error budget remaining, and burn rate (how fast you are consuming the budget). Teams use it to decide whether to prioritise reliability work.
What is Grafonnet and why should I use it?
Grafonnet is a Jsonnet library for generating Grafana dashboard JSON. Instead of JSON blobs in Git, you write Jsonnet that is more readable, reusable, and diff-friendly. Changes are reviewable in PRs like application code.
How do I add deployment annotations to Grafana?
The most reliable approach is a Kubernetes CronJob or CI step that POSTs to the Grafana Annotations API after each deployment. ArgoCD app sync events can also trigger annotations via its notification system.
Can Grafana connect to non-Prometheus data sources?
Yes. Grafana supports CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Loki, Tempo, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and many others via plugins. We build unified dashboards that correlate metrics from multiple sources in a single view.

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Written by Saddique Khan, AWS & Azure Certified · Last updated October 2025