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Last modified July 17, 2025

Dashboard exploration

This guide shows you how to explore and discover dashboards in the Giant Swarm Observability Platform. You’ll learn about the pre-built dashboards available out of the box, how to search and navigate between dashboards, and tips for organizing your dashboard workspace.

Giant Swarm provides a comprehensive set of pre-built dashboards that give you immediate visibility into your infrastructure, applications, and platform health. These dashboards are designed to help you monitor everything from Kubernetes cluster performance to application metrics without requiring initial setup.

Accessing dashboards in Grafana

To start exploring dashboards, you’ll need access to your Grafana instance. If you haven’t accessed Grafana yet, follow the data exploration guide for authentication steps.

Once you’re logged in to Grafana:

  1. Navigate to dashboards: Click the Dashboards icon (grid squares) in the left sidebar
  2. Browse by organization: You’ll see all dashboards available in your selected Grafana organization, switching to another Grafana organization will most likely change the list of available dashboards.
  3. Start with Shared Org: The Shared Org contains system dashboards accessible to all users

Out-of-the-box dashboards

Giant Swarm provides a comprehensive set of public dashboards that are accessible to customers based on the dashboards available in the “public_dashboards” section of the Giant Swarm dashboards repository.

Core platform dashboards

Essential cluster and infrastructure monitoring:

  • Cluster Overview - High-level cluster health and resource utilization
  • Node Overview - Individual node metrics, CPU, memory, disk usage
  • Node Utilization - Node resource allocation and capacity planning

Kubernetes component dashboards

Core Kubernetes service monitoring:

  • API Server Performance - Kubernetes API server metrics and latency
  • Certificate Details - TLS certificate expiration and health monitoring
  • Persistent Volume Usage - Storage metrics and volume health
  • Giant Swarm / Kubernetes Persistent Volumes - Enhanced PV monitoring

Network and ingress dashboards

Network infrastructure and traffic monitoring:

  • DNS - DNS resolution performance and CoreDNS metrics
  • Ingress NGINX Controller - NGINX ingress controller performance
  • NGINX Ingress Controller Connection Distribution - Connection patterns
  • Cilium Performance - Cilium CNI performance and BPF map pressure
  • External DNS - External DNS controller metrics

Application and workload dashboards

Application performance and resource monitoring:

  • Pod Requests vs Usage - Resource requests vs actual consumption
  • SLO Reporting - Service Level Objective compliance tracking
  • Container Images from docker.io - Container image usage analytics
  • Kong Connection Distribution - Kong ingress controller metrics

Observability platform dashboards

Monitoring infrastructure health:

  • Prometheus - Prometheus server performance and resource usage
  • Prometheus Remote Write - Remote write performance metrics
  • Alertmanager / Overview - Alert management and notification status

Cluster automation dashboards

Platform automation and lifecycle management:

  • Flux Control Plane - GitOps controller health and sync status
  • KEDA - Kubernetes Event Driven autoscaling metrics
  • Karpenter - Node autoscaling performance (AWS)
  • AWS Load Balancer Controller - AWS LB controller metrics (AWS)

These dashboards are continuously updated and maintained through the Giant Swarm dashboards repository and automatically deployed via Helm charts. Many dashboards come from upstream monitoring mixins (kubernetes-mixin, prometheus-mixin, alertmanager-mixin) that are regularly synchronized to provide best-practice monitoring patterns.

How to search and navigate dashboards

Using the dashboard browser

  1. Browse by folder: Dashboards are organized in folders by category (Platform, Kubernetes, Applications, etc.)
  2. Use tags: Filter dashboards using tags like cluster, application, or infrastructure
  3. Recent dashboards: Quick access to your recently viewed dashboards
  4. Starred dashboards: Mark important dashboards as favorites for easy access

Search functionality

Grafana provides powerful search capabilities:

  1. Quick search: Use the search box at the top of the dashboard list
  2. Search by name: Type dashboard names or partial names
  3. Search by tags: Filter using tags like kubernetes, monitoring, or alerts
  4. Advanced filters: Use the filter options to narrow by organization, folder, or dashboard type

Dashboard navigation tips

  • Dashboard links: Many dashboards include navigation links to related dashboards
  • Time range consistency: Your selected time range carries across dashboard navigation
  • Breadcrumb navigation: Use the breadcrumb trail to understand your current location
  • Bookmark important dashboards: Save URLs to dashboards you use frequently

Getting started with dashboard exploration

For new users

Start with these essential dashboards to get oriented:

  1. Management Cluster Overview: Understand your overall platform health and management cluster status
  2. K8s Resources - Cluster: Get familiar with your cluster resources and capacity
  3. Nodes Overview: Check the health and performance of your infrastructure nodes

For developers

Focus on application and development-related dashboards:

  1. K8s Resources - Namespace: Monitor your team’s namespace resources and workload distribution
  2. K8s Resources - Pod: Understand individual pod resource consumption patterns
  3. Managed Apps: Track the performance of Giant Swarm managed applications you’re using
  4. Container Images from docker.io: Monitor Docker image pull patterns and registry usage

For platform teams

Concentrate on infrastructure and platform monitoring:

  1. Management Cluster Overview: Monitor platform stability and control plane health
  2. K8s API Performance: Track cluster API performance and ETCD health
  3. Prometheus Overview: Monitor the observability platform itself
  4. Alertmanager Overview: Stay on top of platform alerts and notification routing
  5. Service Level: Track SLOs and error budgets across platform services

Next steps

Once you’re comfortable navigating existing dashboards:

Dashboard exploration works best when integrated with other platform capabilities: