Dashboards

Create custom visualizations and share insights across teams with flexible dashboards that combine metrics, logs, traces, and more in real-time.

Overview

With Instana dashboards, you can create custom visualizations of your observability data. Combine metrics, logs, traces, and events into unified views that tell the story of your system's health and performance.

Instana provides curated dashboards for common use cases, and you can easily create your own custom dashboards directly within the UI. For advanced needs, use the Instana data source plug-in for Grafana or query the REST API to build dashboards in any tool.

Key features

Dashboards include the following key features:

  • Drag and drop builder: Create dashboards without writing code.
  • Real-time updates: See live data with 1-second refresh rates.
  • Multiple widget types: Charts, tables, service maps, and more.
  • Cross-data correlation: Combine metrics, logs, traces, and events in one view.
  • Team sharing: Share dashboards with specific teams or make them public.
  • Grafana integration: Use Instana as a data source in Grafana.

Common use cases

See the following example use cases:

Executive dashboards
Create high-level views that show the overall system health, service level agreement (SLA) compliance, and business metrics. Share with leadership to demonstrate reliability and performance.
Team-specific views
Build dashboards that are tailored to each team's responsibilities. Front end teams see browser metrics, backend teams see API performance, and platform teams see infrastructure health.
Incident control rooms
Create focused dashboards during incidents that show relevant metrics, recent changes, and affected services. Share with incident responders for coordinated troubleshooting.
Performance monitoring
Track key performance indicators (KPIs) like response time, throughput, error rate, and resource utilization. Set up dashboards for continuous monitoring and optimization.

Where to find it in the UI

You can access dashboards from the following locations in the UI:

  • Built-in dashboards: Pre-built dashboards are available throughout the UI for hosts, applications, services, and infrastructure components.
  • Custom dashboards: Select Custom dashboards from the navigation menu to view and create custom dashboards.
  • Create dashboard: Click Create dashboard + from the Custom dashboards page.

What problems does this solve?

Dashboards address the following common observability challenges:

  • Data silos: Combine metrics, logs, and traces in unified views.
  • Context switching: See all relevant data in one place instead of jumping between tools.
  • Communication gaps: Share insights with stakeholders through visual dashboards.
  • Monitoring blind spots: Create custom views for unique monitoring needs.
  • Slow decision-making: Enable data-driven decisions with real-time visualizations.

Related capabilities

The following capabilities work together with dashboards:

Learn more

For detailed information about dashboard creation, widget types, and advanced features, see: