What is a Dashboard?

dash·board /ˈdaSHˌbôrd/ noun noun: dashboard; plural noun: dashboards

the panel facing the driver of a vehicle or the pilot of an aircraft, containing instruments and controls.

Why Do I Need a Dashboard?

A dashboard provides a quick way to see what is going on and find out about any errors or issues that may have happened.

My Current Dashboard solution

My current solution is a project called Glance. Glance is an open-source project that is very flexible and customizable. It uses YAML for configuration, and the community has contributed several widgets that can be added to your dashboard.

Glance is great for simple widgets, and links to various homelab services, but Glance falls short in terms of being able to view details and metrics that aren’t already fit into a widget. Glance does offer a custom API widget that can be almost anything you set your mind to, but it requires a bit of work to make it function and display properly.

I need want something different, perhaps something better. I want something that I can feed data sources into and it just work. This brings me to my next project; Grafana.

My New Solution

If you’re into homelabs and haven’t heard of Grafana, please send me a photo of the rock you’ve been living under. All jokes aside, Grafana is known to be one of the best, if not the best monitoring and observability tool. Grafana provides a very polished frontend UI, that can be configured to use many data sources to display data. The front end has some nice features to filter, sort and drilldown into data.

Grafana is also blessed with lots of community support, as well as official support from the organization that made Grafana.

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