Editing a dashboard

Everything you do in the editor happens in your browser until you press Save. A save writes a new version of the dashboard, and it is the moment the server checks the whole spec again and every query in it; until then nothing you have typed has reached the server. This page is what an editing session holds and what happens to work that is never saved.

The canvas and the inspector

The editor is the dashboard itself. The canvas draws every panel with a live preview, run when the panel appears and again when its query, window or variable values change, after a short pause in typing. Moving, resizing or restyling a panel keeps the rows it already has.

Click a panel (or focus it and press Enter) to select it. The inspector beside the canvas then edits that panel, top to bottom:

• Ask AI: the natural-language edit, which runs the model once and shows the change as a diff to accept, reject or regenerate.
• Data: the source, the query with its preview, and the panel’s own window and refresh. For a SQL source that is the SQL and its time field; for a Prometheus source it is the PromQL, Instant and Min step (see Writing the query); for a Loki source it is the LogQL, with the same two fields for a metric query (see A LogQL panel). Choosing a source of the other kind restarts the query from that source’s starter rather than keeping one its source cannot run. A text panel shows its Markdown here.
• Visualization: title, kind, value format and description.
• Display: the presentation options, collapsed until wanted. A custom visual’s whole spec is edited here, as JSON: a problem the checks find (data other than the panel’s rows, a literal color, an unknown mark) is named under the field as you type, and so is the compiler’s message when the spec does not compile. See Custom visuals.
• Links: where the panel leads (see Links below). Not on a text panel.

The panel’s actions menu holds Duplicate, Save as template and Delete. Closing the panel (or selecting nothing) shows the dashboard’s own settings instead: the time range (the same picker readers use), the refresh interval as presets with a custom value in seconds, the Arrange: N-up presets, Variables, Annotations, and the description and tags. The title is edited in place at the top of the page. On a narrow screen the inspector sits under the canvas.

Saving

There is one Save. It opens a small form with the optional version note and two ways to finish, which differ only in where they leave you:

• Save version writes a new version and keeps you in the editor. The version number in the header goes up and the “unsaved changes” marker clears.
• Save and view does the same and then opens the live dashboard.

The keyboard shortcuts save directly, without the form. The version note is a short line about what changed, stored with the version. Nothing reads it — it is not part of the spec, it never reaches the model, and it has no effect on execution. It is there so a version history reads as a sequence of intentions rather than a column of timestamps, and the history page shows it beside each version.

A failed save leaves you exactly where you were, with the error and every change still in the editor.

Links

The Links section edits the panel’s drilldown links without JSON. Each link is a row with its title and target, which can be edited, moved up or down, or removed. Add link opens a form:

• Leads to: this dashboard, or another one in the workspace, found by title.
• Title: what the menu item or the click says. It follows the target’s title until it is changed.
• Carry the time range and Carry the variable picks, on by default, and Open in a new tab for a link to another dashboard.
• Set on arrival: one row per pick. The variable is chosen from the ones the target declares (this dashboard’s own for a self link). Its value is a literal, a column of the clicked row (the columns this panel’s last preview returned), or the clicked series. A pick the target does not declare is flagged, since the target would ignore it.

A link that stays on this dashboard must set at least one of its variables; the form refuses it otherwise. Links (JSON) edits the whole list as JSON for anything the form does not cover. Link changes show in the edit review and in version history, one row per link title.

Version history and restore

Version history in the dashboard’s More actions menu lists every saved version with its author, time and note. Pick one to see what changed between it and the current version, panel by panel with the query as a line diff, or to preview it. The preview runs each panel’s query once and saves nothing. Viewers can read the history too, since every version in it is a dashboard they could have seen when it was current.

An editor can restore a version. Restore does not edit anything or move the dashboard back to an old version. It saves a new version that copies the old one, noted restored from vN, so the restore shows up in the history like any other save and can itself be undone the same way. The copy is checked like a save: if a source, table or column the old version reads has since been removed or hidden, the restore is refused and the current version stays.

Details, which are not the spec

Description and tags in the dashboard settings (also in the editor’s overflow menu, and the Details… action on a card in the dashboard list) edits the dashboard’s description and tags. Those are kept beside the dashboard rather than in it: they do not make the editor dirty, they are not undoable, they are saved the moment the dialog is confirmed, and they do not add a version.

The name is the opposite case and is edited in the page header with the rest of the dashboard. Renaming from the dashboard list does the same thing the long way round — it adds a version that differs only in the title — because the spec owns the title.

Arranging panels

Order, position and size live in one place: the canvas. Drag a panel to move it and drag its corner to resize it; with a panel focused, the arrow keys move it, Shift and the arrow keys resize it, and Delete removes it. Each gesture is one change, committed when the pointer comes up.

The Arrange: N-up presets in the dashboard settings re-flow every panel into N columns in reading order, as one undoable step. Duplicate copies a panel with a fresh id, " (copy)" on the title, and the row directly below the original; anything already there is pushed down rather than covered. The copy is selected, because the point of duplicating is to then change it.

Deleting is undoable, so it asks first only when there is work to lose — when the panel’s query is no longer the starter the editor wrote for it.

New panels

Add panel offers three starts: a blank panel, describe it to the model, or from a template.

A blank panel starts from a query built out of the selected source’s own catalog, so it always runs: on a SQL source, the first table with a time column, counted per minute, as a line chart (a plain count as a stat when no table has a time column); on a Prometheus source, a rate over its first counter, else a histogram’s p95, else a gauge’s sum. The template picker’s built-ins for a Prometheus source are golden signals built the same way from its catalog.

Describing adds the same starter and puts the cursor in the natural-language box, so the first thing you do with the panel is say what it should be. That runs the model once and lands as a reviewable diff, exactly like any other natural-language edit.

Panel description

The inspector’s Visualization section has a Description field: one sentence saying what the panel computes. The model writes one for every panel it generates, and this is where a human corrects it. It is shown to readers behind the info control on the panel header, never as a paragraph on the dashboard itself.

Undo and redo

Every change — adding, duplicating, moving, resizing, deleting or editing a panel, arranging the grid, applying a template, accepting a natural-language edit, re-pointing panels off a removed source — is one step. Undo and redo walk them; a new change after an undo abandons the redo branch.

Typing coalesces. A burst of keystrokes in one field within a second is one step, so undoing a renamed panel takes back the rename, not the last letter of it. Inside a text box the browser’s own undo still works.

Unsaved changes

The editor knows whether anything has actually changed by comparing what you have with what was last saved, so typing a character and deleting it again is correctly not a change.

While there is a real change:

• Closing or reloading the tab asks the browser’s “leave site?” prompt.
• Clicking a link out of the editor — including Close — asks first, and offers Save and leave, Discard changes, or Keep editing.

Draft autosave

A moment after you stop typing, the editor keeps a draft of your work in this browser, for this dashboard and this account. Reopening the editor offers it back with a summary of what it would change.

Three things to know about a draft:

• It is only in your browser. Nothing is sent to the server until you save, and a draft is not visible to anyone else or from another device.
• It never silently wins. It is restored by a click, never on load. If the dashboard was saved by someone else while the draft sat in your browser, the editor says so: restoring writes your changes as a new version on top of theirs rather than replacing them.
• It does not last forever. A draft expires after a week, and is cleared on a successful save or an explicit discard.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? in the editor for the list. Every binding is an accelerator for a button that is still there — nothing is reachable by keyboard only. The modifier follows the platform (⌘ on macOS, Ctrl elsewhere), and bare-letter bindings do not fire while you are typing in a field.

Binding	Does
⌘S / Ctrl+S	Save a version and keep editing
⌘⇧S / Ctrl+Shift+S	Save and view the dashboard
⌘Z / Ctrl+Z	Undo
⌘⇧Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z	Redo
⌘Enter / Ctrl+Enter	Apply the natural-language edit; run the preview in the SQL box
N	Add a panel
D	Duplicate the selected panel
/	Focus the natural-language prompt
Esc	Dismiss the generated panel under review
?	Show the shortcut list