Master Nightingale Dashboards: Build Pie, Gauge, and Honeycomb Charts Step‑by‑Step

In modern operations, visualizing monitoring data is essential. Nightingale, an open‑source high‑performance monitoring and alerting system, offers flexible dashboards that many enterprises adopt.

Metric (Gauge) Chart

Use when you need to display a single key metric’s current value or trend, suitable for large‑screen displays or home‑page overviews.

Enter Dashboard → Add Chart → Metric

Enter PromQL:

node_time_seconds{instance=~"$instance"} - node_boot_time_seconds{instance=~"$instance"}

Set Legend name to {{instance}} Panel Settings: Title, Description

Chart Style: Background color

Advanced Settings: Y‑axis unit, decimal places

Pie Chart

Best for showing the composition proportion of a metric.

Enter Dashboard → Add Chart → Pie

Enter PromQL: sum(coredns_dns_requests_total) by (type) Set Legend name to {{type}} Panel Settings: Title

Chart Style: Enable legend at bottom, enable donut mode, show labels

Advanced Settings: Unit for total

Honeycomb Chart

Unique to Nightingale, suitable for displaying health status of multiple instances or services.

Enter Dashboard → Add Chart → Honeycomb

Enter PromQL:

max(100 - ((node_filesystem_avail_bytes{instance=~"$instance",fstype!="tmpfs"} * 100) / node_filesystem_size_bytes{instance=~"$instance",fstype!="tmpfs"})) by (instance, mountpoint)

Set Legend name to {{type}} Panel Settings: Title, Description

Chart Style: Choose colors (Green/Orange)

Advanced Settings: Unit, decimal places

A well‑designed monitoring dashboard acts as a command center for ops teams; by using metric, pie, and honeycomb charts in Nightingale you can build visualizations that are both beautiful and highly practical.