Viewing a dashboard

A dashboard is live from the moment it opens: the panels fill, the header says Live, and every panel refreshes on its own cadence without you doing anything. This page is what you can do from there. Nothing on it runs the model, and nothing asks the server for a row the panels are not already showing. What happens underneath — one shared poller per dashboard, and charts that merge new rows rather than redraw — is Streaming and rendering.

Choosing the time window

The time picker in the header sets the window every panel shows. There are three ways to say it:

• Quick ranges: 15 minutes to 7 days, relative to now, so the window rolls forward as data arrives.
• Last N: a width of your own, in minutes, hours, days or weeks, still relative to now.
• Absolute: a start and an end, entered in your own time zone.

Once a window is chosen, shift back and shift forward move it by its own width and zoom out doubles it. Shifting forward past now snaps back to a rolling window of the same width, which is how you return to live after going to look at yesterday.

Two more ways to choose a window are on the charts themselves. Drag across a line, area or bar chart to make the stretch you covered the dashboard’s window. And panels share a crosshair: hover one chart and the others mark the same moment.

An absolute window is a fixed range, and the picker badges it that way. The panels keep refreshing, but they show the same seconds each time, so “no new data” is what to expect; the badge offers the way back to a rolling window.

The window is part of the page URL, so copying the address bar gives someone a link to exactly what you are looking at. A dashboard opened without one uses its own default range, which is set in the editor.

Pausing

Pause in the header stops updates; Resume picks them up again, and the panels catch up on what they missed. Paused is its own muted state in the indicator, not a lost connection, and an error on a panel still shows while paused because it is still true. In the hosted demo, a tab left alone for a while pauses itself; Resume brings it back.

The connection indicator

The header indicator says whether the dashboard is live, reconnecting, paused or disconnected, and how long ago data last arrived — counting up for the first minute, then as a clock time. That clock is about the data, not the connection: a reconnect does not reset it, so a number that is three minutes old says so even after the stream comes back.

A dropped stream reconnects by itself and names each attempt. If the retries keep failing, a Reconnect button appears. When your session has ended, the sign-in banner says so instead; sign in again and the dashboard resumes where it was. Screen readers hear a state change as one sentence, not a stream of counting seconds.

A panel’s menu

Every panel has a menu (the ⋯ in its header), and the info control beside the title shows the one-sentence description of what the panel computes.

• Show query opens the panel’s statement — SQL or PromQL — with its source and time field, or for PromQL how it is evaluated. It is not offered on a text panel or through a share link.
• Ask about this panel opens the dashboard chat with the panel attached to your question.
• The panel’s links, if the editor gave it any, lead to another dashboard carrying your window and picks; see Drilldown.
• Fullscreen expands the panel over the whole viewport. Escape closes it and puts focus back where it was.
• Export CSV saves the rows the panel is showing right now, ready for a spreadsheet. A text value a spreadsheet would run as a formula is escaped, since the values come from a database Holotable does not own; numbers are never changed.
• Export PNG saves the chart as an image on the theme’s background. Stat and table panels offer CSV only.

An export is always the window the panel already holds. It cannot reach a row the panel was not showing, and it is not a way to run a query.

Finding things: Cmd/Ctrl+K

Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K elsewhere) anywhere in the app to open the command palette. Start typing to find a dashboard or a data source by name, jump to one of the app’s pages, or run an action: new dashboard, new source, switch the theme, or refresh a source’s catalog if you administer it. The commands you use most lead the list before you type; once you type, the best match leads.

It only ever shows what you could already open from the sidebar, in the workspaces you belong to.

Asking about it

The chat beside every dashboard answers questions about what is on screen, with the same window and picks you are viewing. It is read-only and has its own page: Dashboard chat.