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Observability Stack

Create Your First Dashboard

This guide walks you through creating a custom dashboard in OpenSearch Dashboards to visualize your observability data.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”

Step 1: Open Dashboards

Section titled “Step 1: Open Dashboards”

Navigate to http://localhost:5601 and go to Dashboards > Create new.

Step 2: Add a visualization

Section titled “Step 2: Add a visualization”
  1. Select Add > Create new visualization.
  2. Choose a visualization type (line chart, bar chart, data table, etc.).
  3. Select your data source:
    • For trace data: use the otel-v1-apm-span-* index pattern
    • For metrics: use a Prometheus data source with PromQL
  4. Configure your query and axes.
  5. Select Save and return.

Step 3: Add more panels

Section titled “Step 3: Add more panels”

Common panels for an observability dashboard:

  • Request rate: Count of spans over time
  • Error rate: Spans where status.code = 2 over time
  • P99 latency: 99th percentile of durationInNanos
  • Service map: Embedded service map visualization

Step 4: Save the dashboard

Section titled “Step 4: Save the dashboard”

Select Save, give your dashboard a name, and optionally add it to an Observability workspace.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”