📊 Dashboards

Grafana Dashboard Guide for Windows

Create, import and manage Grafana dashboards on Windows. Covers panel types, variables, time ranges, provisioning dashboards as code and sharing with your team.

Create your first dashboard

Open Dashboards

Go to Dashboards → New → New dashboard.

Add a panel

Click Add visualization. Select your data source.

Write a query

For Prometheus: rate(windows_cpu_time_total[5m]). For InfluxDB use the query builder. Click Run query to preview.

Choose panel type

Select Time series for metrics over time, Stat for single values, Table for tabular data, Gauge for progress indicators.

Save the dashboard

Press Ctrl+S or click the save icon. Give it a name and folder.

Import community dashboards

The Grafana community publishes thousands of ready-made dashboards at grafana.com/grafana/dashboards. Import by ID in seconds.

Dashboards → New → Import

Open the Import dialog.

Enter a dashboard ID

Popular IDs for Windows: 14694 (Windows Exporter Full), 10467 (Windows Node), 1860 (Node Exporter Full).

Select data source & Import

Map the data source variable to your Prometheus or InfluxDB connection and click Import.

Dashboard variables (template variables)

Variables make dashboards dynamic — e.g. a dropdown to switch between servers or environments.

# Example: variable to select a Windows host
Name:  instance
Type:  Query
Query: label_values(windows_os_info, instance)

# Use in panel queries:
windows_cpu_time_total{instance="$instance"}

Add variables via Dashboard settings (gear icon) → Variables → New variable.

Useful panel types

📈 Time series

Line or bar chart over time. Best for CPU, memory, network trends.

🔢 Stat

Single large number with optional sparkline. Good for current CPU %, uptime.

📋 Table

Tabular data from SQL queries or metric labels. Good for service states.

🌡 Gauge

Radial or bar gauge for values with min/max. Disk usage, memory %.

📜 Logs

Display log streams from Loki. Shows log lines with level filtering.

🔔 Alert list

Shows active alerts and their states from Grafana Alerting.

Provision dashboards as code

Store dashboards as JSON files and provision them automatically — great for version control and repeatable deployments.

Create C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\grafana\conf\provisioning\dashboards\windows.yaml:

apiVersion: 1
providers:
  - name: Windows Dashboards
    folder: Windows
    type: file
    options:
      path: C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\grafana\conf\dashboards

Export any dashboard as JSON from Dashboard settings → JSON model and save it to the dashboards folder. Grafana loads it automatically on restart.

Share and export dashboards

Share link

Click the share icon on any dashboard to get a direct URL. Toggle Lock time range to share a snapshot at a specific time.

Export as JSON

Dashboard settings → JSON model → Copy to clipboard or save as file. Import the JSON on another Grafana instance.

Export as PDF (Enterprise)

Grafana Enterprise supports PDF export for reports. OSS users can use the grafana-image-renderer plugin for panel PNG export.