Grafana Dashboard Design: How to Make Hybrid IT Landscapes Truly Manageable
- Oliver Groht
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Why Dashboard Design Determines the Success of Your Observability Strategy
Hybrid IT landscapes—combining on-premises data centers, private clouds, and public clouds—have long become the norm for mid-sized enterprises. Many organizations already use Grafana to visualize metrics, logs, and traces. However, the real business value often does not fail because of technology, but because of dashboard design.
When dashboards are overloaded, inconsistent, or difficult to understand, executives quickly lose trust in the data. Observability then remains an IT tool—rather than evolving into a shared management instrument for leadership, business units, and operations.
This article shows how professional Grafana dashboard design can make hybrid IT landscapes truly manageable, with a clear focus on experienced users who already operate dashboards and want to evolve them in a targeted, strategic way.
Requirements for Dashboards in Hybrid IT Landscapes
Here is a precise, executive-level English translation, aligned with consulting and thought-leadership standards:
A dashboard for mixed on-premises and cloud environments must connect three distinct layers:
Business layer: Which services and processes are affected?
Platform layer: Which locations and platforms are delivering performance?
Technical layer: Where exactly do bottlenecks or failures occur?
From this, core design principles emerge:
Focus on a small number of business-relevant metrics per view
Consistent representation across data center, private cloud, and public cloud
Clear visual indicators for deviations and trends
Different views tailored to management, business units, and IT operations
Grafana provides all the necessary capabilities: flexible panel layouts, drill-downs, variables, reusable dashboard templates, and—through Label-Based Access Control (LBAC)—fine-grained control over access to data sources.
The key point is this: these capabilities should not be used in a feature-driven way, but aligned with clear business-driven steering questions.
Dashboard Storytelling: From High-Level Overview to Root Cause
In recent webinars such as “Getting Started with Grafana Dashboard Design” and “Building Advanced Grafana Dashboards”, one core idea is consistently emphasized: great dashboards tell a clear story.
For hybrid IT environments, the following structure has proven effective:
Top: Business Overview
Three to five key metrics reflecting the overall health of the most critical services (e.g., ERP, e-commerce platform, customer portal), independent of whether they run on-premises or in the cloud.
Middle: Platform and Location View
Segmentation by data center, private cloud, public cloud, and—if relevant—by region or tenant. The objective is to localize bottlenecks quickly.
Bottom: Technical Detail View
Infrastructure metrics such as CPU, memory, storage, network, containers, and clusters, grouped by location or service.
Each layer answers a distinct question:
How is the business performing?
Where is the issue—location, platform, or service?
What is the most likely technical root cause?
For experienced users, this means designing dashboards deliberately as a drill-down chain, not as a collection of isolated charts. A management dashboard should clearly reference platform and technical dashboards, rather than attempting to combine everything into a single, overloaded view.
Panel Design: Clear Roles, Clear Questions
Many productive Grafana installations suffer from panel inflation. For experienced users, it is worth cleaning up rigorously and clearly separating roles.
Proven layout principles:
A maximum of 6–8 panels visible without scrolling
One dashboard per role (management, business units, operations) instead of “one size fits all”
Consistent color logic: green = normal, yellow = warning, red = critical — applied across all dashboards
Consistent time ranges per dashboard, e.g. “last 24 hours” by default, with quick selection for “last 7 days”
Targeted use of panel types:
Stat and gauge panels for core KPIs such as availability, error rate, and response time
Time series panels for trends, seasonality, and early warning indicators
Table panels for list views (top-N errors, slowest services, abnormal hosts)
Bar or pie charts only where proportions and percentage-based comparisons are truly decision-relevant
Each panel should answer one clear question, such as:
How available was the customer portal over the last 24 hours?
Which region is currently generating the most errors?
Which Proxmox clusters are consistently running above 80% CPU utilization?
If such a question cannot be clearly articulated, the panel belongs either in a dedicated technical dashboard—or should be removed entirely. This results in an interface that decision-makers can read intuitively, without requiring deep technical knowledge.
Combining Data Sources Effectively in Hybrid Environments
In hybrid IT landscapes, data originates from on-premises monitoring systems, cloud metrics, virtualization platforms such as Proxmox, container environments, and log systems. Grafana allows these sources to be combined into a single dashboard—the real challenge lies in standardization.
Best practices for experienced users:
Define shared metrics
For example, define “service availability” or “response time” consistently across all platforms, rather than maintaining separate definitions per tool.
Standardize labels and naming conventions
Uniform labels such as env=prod|test, location=dc1|cloud, service=crm|shop, tenant=… simplify filtering, variables, and LBAC.
Visually separate environments
Clearly distinguish production, test, and development environments—using color schemes, panel groupings, or dedicated dashboards.
Beginner tutorials—such as setting up an initial Grafana dashboard using a Radxa ROCK 3A in the OKdo and DesignSpark ecosystem—demonstrate well how to start with a small, clearly defined data source.
For hybrid production environments, this approach must be expanded: use templates inspired by official examples and import dashboards from Grafana Labs documentation, for platforms such as Proxmox.
The real business value emerges when technical data sources are translated into a shared service perspective: instead of “CPU load on Cluster 1,” business units see “risk to order processing in the online shop.”
LBAC: Targeted Control of Access to Data Sources
As observability adoption grows, governance requirements increase. Especially in hybrid environments with multiple tenants, countries, or sensitive systems, simple role- or folder-based access models are often insufficient.
This is where Label-Based Access Control (LBAC) for data sources in Grafana becomes essential. Access is governed not only by roles, but by labels attached to data sources and datasets.
Practical benefits of LBAC:
Fine-grained separation by department, tenant, country, or criticality
Improved support for compliance and audit requirements
Reduced need for data exports, as dashboards can be precisely tailored
Typical implementation steps:
Label data sources, e.g.
department=finance|production|it,
criticality=high|medium|low,
tenant=A|B
Build dashboards so panels use these labels as filters—via variables or fixed filters
Assign user roles access to specific label combinations, not to all data sources
This approach balances transparency with controlled access—an essential prerequisite for broad Grafana adoption beyond IT.
For executives, this means receiving exactly the insights they need, without unnecessary detail or compliance risk.
Importing, Templates, and Incremental Scaling
Many teams start with a simple setup and evolve toward hybrid observability. Experienced users should think about scalability from the outset.
Recommended approach:
Start with a clearly defined system (e.g. a Proxmox cluster or a core business application)
Import official or community dashboards from Grafana Labs documentation and analyze them
Systematically simplify these dashboards: remove unnecessary panels, standardize colors and time ranges, tailor KPIs to the organization
Turn mature dashboards into templates that can be reused for additional locations, clusters, or tenants
This creates a consistent dashboard catalog rather than uncontrolled sprawl. At the same time, rollout effort decreases: new locations or tenants receive a proven set of views that only require fine-tuning.
Common Design Pitfalls—and How to Avoid Them
Even experienced Grafana users frequently encounter similar issues:
Excessive technical focus without business context
Unclear or inconsistent naming of services and systems
Different color logic across dashboards
Lack of governance: dashboards built in isolation, without shared standards
Countermeasures:
Define 5–10 core metrics per service together with business stakeholders
Establish and document naming conventions and label standards
Create a small, cross-functional “dashboard owner” group
Use webinars such as “Getting Started with Grafana Dashboard Design” and “Building Advanced Grafana Dashboards” as the foundation for internal training
This turns dashboard design into a continuous design discipline—rather than a one-off project that quickly becomes outdated.
Conclusion: Grafana as the Cockpit for Hybrid IT—and What to Do Next
Grafana is no longer just a tool for system administrators. With professional dashboard design, it becomes the cockpit for your hybrid IT landscape—and a strategic management instrument.
What matters most:
A clear narrative from business overview to technical root cause
Rigorous reduction to role-specific, essential KPIs
Consistent labels and conventions across all data sources
Controlled access through Label-Based Access Control
For mid-sized enterprises, this delivers tangible benefits:
Better decision quality: Management immediately sees which services are critical and where action is required
Faster incident resolution: Operations teams navigate from symptom to root cause in a structured way
Higher business adoption: Dashboards are perceived as a clear steering instrument—not just technical monitoring
If observability is already in place, the next lever is rarely more metrics—it is better design. Start with a business-critical service, review your dashboards against the principles outlined above, and establish them as your company-wide standard.
This is how Grafana dashboards evolve from an IT playground into a measurable competitive advantage for the entire organization.
About Arkcanis Consulting
Arkcanis Consulting GmbH is the specialized consulting arm of the Arkcanis Group. We design scalable process and data architectures for airlines, AOCs, operators, and technology-driven organizations—with a strong focus on Aviation Engineering, Leon integrations, Atlassian architectures, ETL pipelines, and real-time dashboards.
As founder of catworkx GmbH, one of the largest Atlassian partners in the DACH region, Oliver Groht brings over 25 years of experience in Jira and Confluence architectures, process consulting, and organization-wide scaling. Today, he combines this expertise with deep technical knowledge in Leon GraphQL, data engineering, Grafana, and flight operations workflows.
The result: measurable, transparent, and resilient structures that enable operational excellence and strengthen strategic decision-making at management and C-level.
