Grafana Tutorial: Building Monitoring Dashboards for Frontend Performance

QQ Live frontend team integrated Tencent Cloud frontend performance monitoring (RUM) and built a monitoring dashboard using Grafana to visualize and analyze project metrics.

Grafana is an open-source data visualization tool that runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Docker. It can be downloaded from https://grafana.com/get/ .

To build a dashboard, first add a data source (e.g., Prometheus, InfluxDB) via the DataSource management panel, then install needed plugins using the Grafana CLI. Example installation commands are:

FROM grafana/grafana:8.3.1

USER root

RUN grafana-cli plugins install grafana-clickhouse-datasource //数据源插件

RUN grafana-cli plugins install auxmoney-waterfall-panel //图表插

Grafana offers various panel types suited to different data: time series (line, bar, point) for trends and changes over time; pie charts and gauges for proportions; stat panels for single values; tables for multi‑dimensional data; and text panels supporting Markdown/HTML.

Basic panel configuration includes title, description, background transparency, tooltip (Single, All, Hidden), legend display modes (List, Table, Hidden), legend position (Bottom, Right), and axis settings (label, width, soft min/max, grid lines, scale).

Advanced features allow further refinement: thresholds to color‑code value ranges (e.g., green <3000ms, yellow 3000‑5000ms, red >5000ms); value mappings to replace specific values or ranges with custom text; overrides to apply per‑series or per‑field settings; variables and templates for dynamic, reusable panels; panel repeat to duplicate panels based on variable values; links and data links for navigation between dashboards or external URLs; and drill‑down using variable‑linked URLs.

Transformations enable data processing directly in Grafana: add fields from calculations (reduce row or binary operations), convert field types, filter by name or regex, merge fields on time series, and rename fields using regex.

Overall, Grafana provides a flexible, powerful platform for creating data dashboards, monitoring systems, and performing data‑driven analysis, making it ideal for building observability solutions in frontend and backend services.