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Tutorial

This tutorial walks through building a dashboard with the Host Overview Panel step by step, starting from a basic Prometheus setup and progressively adding features.

Each page builds on the previous one, so it's best to follow them in order.

Prerequisites

  • Grafana 12.0 or later.
  • A Prometheus data source with node exporter and cadvisor metrics (or Alloy's unix and cadvisor integrations).

Tip

You can use provisioned Grafana environment from this plugin's repo to set up all data sources and explore demo dashboards:

  1. Clone this repo:

    git clone https://github.com/taminomara/grafana-host-overview-panel.git
cd grafana-host-overview-panel

  2. Install NPM dependencies:

    npm install

  3. Build plugin:

    npm run build

  4. Start Grafana, Prometheus, and sidecar containers:

    docker compose up -d

  5. Give Grafana a few minutes to initialize and provision all dashboards.

  6. Navigate to http://localhost:3000/dashboards and explore example dashboards.

  7. Login to grafana under username admin, password admin to change default theme.

Pages

  1. Basic setup — create a panel, add a query, configure resource ID, status, and grouping.
  2. Adding more data — join CPU and memory metrics from other queries into resource tooltips.
  3. Displaying thresholds in cells — use thresholds to highlight cells when metrics exceed limits.
  4. Marking cells as sidecars — visually distinguish auxiliary resources like monitoring agents.
  5. Adding known IDs — show placeholder cells for missing resources.
  6. Adding data to host groups — attach host-level metrics to group headers.
  7. Adding data links — navigate from groups and cells to detailed dashboards.
  8. Sorting — control sort order for resources and groups, including custom regex-based sorting.