Customizing Dashboards

This guide covers creating custom Grafana panels and dashboards for Rumi monitoring.

Overview

While the canned dashboards cover common monitoring scenarios, you can create custom dashboards to focus on specific metrics, combine data from multiple sources, or add alerting.

Creating Custom Panels

Querying InfluxDB

All Rumi telemetry data is stored in InfluxDB under the rumi_heartbeat_rp retention policy. To create a custom panel:

1. Add a new panel to a dashboard.

2. Select the InfluxDB data source.

3. Write a query targeting the appropriate measurement.

Query Example

To chart process CPU load for a specific container:

SELECT mean("process_cpu_load") FROM "rumi_heartbeat_rp"."application"
WHERE "system_name" =~ /^$system_name$/ AND "vm_name" =~ /^$vm_name$/
GROUP BY time($__interval) fill(null)

Using Template Variables

Reference the existing template variables ($system_name, $vm_name, $app_name, $host_name) in your queries to make custom panels filterable using the same dropdowns as the canned dashboards.

Creating Custom Dashboards

To create a new dashboard:

1. Navigate to Dashboards > New Dashboard.

2. Add panels querying the InfluxDB measurements.

3. Add template variables for filtering (see Setting Up Dashboards for variable query syntax).

4. Save the dashboard.

Available Measurements

For a complete reference of all available InfluxDB measurements, tags, and fields, see the InfluxDB Measurements Reference.

Key measurements for custom dashboards:

Measurement	Content
application	Container and application-level system metrics
application.store	State store operations and hit rates
application.messages	Message counts and throughput
application.messages.type	Per-message-type counts
application.messages.type.latencies	Per-message-type latency statistics
application.transaction	Transaction counts and durations
application.transaction.latencies	Transaction latency percentiles
application.disruptor	Ring buffer utilization
application.disruptor.latencies	Disruptor processing latencies
application.user.gauge	Custom application gauges
application.user.counter	Custom application counters
application.bus	Per-bus messaging statistics
system	Container-level system metrics
system.gc	Garbage collection statistics
system.disk	Disk I/O and space utilization
system.threads	Thread-level statistics

Alerting

Grafana supports alerting on panel queries. You can configure alerts on custom panels to notify when:

• Latency exceeds a threshold.

• Memory usage approaches limits.

• Error rates spike.

• Custom application counters cross thresholds.

See the Grafana alerting documentation for details on configuring alert rules and notification channels.

Best Practices

• Save customizations separately — Avoid modifying canned dashboards directly. Create new dashboards or copy panels to preserve the ability to upgrade canned dashboards.

• Use consistent naming — Follow the tag naming conventions used by the canned dashboards for consistency.

• Leverage template variables — Use the same template variable names so filtering works consistently across dashboards.