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KONIGI

Domains

Infrastructure and FinOps

What the infrastructure is doing and what it costs. Two questions, usually asked by two different people.

4 products 23 captures

Products 4

Cloudflare Radar

A public dashboard with no account, no filters worth the name, and an audience of journalists. Designed for people who will read one number and leave.

Security · Infrastructure and FinOps
Datadog

Everything on one surface, which makes it the best place to see what a page looks like when the product refuses to choose between metrics, logs, traces and cost.

Observability · Infrastructure and FinOps · Security
Grafana

The reference implementation for panel grids, template variables, and stat panels; most other tools are defined by how they differ from it.

Observability · Infrastructure and FinOps · IoT and energy
Netdata

Per-second charts, hundreds per node, with a per-chart anomaly ribbon instead of a band on the series.

Infrastructure and FinOps · Observability

Patterns seen in this domain 53

Captures

Newest first within each product.

Cloudflare Radar

Cloudflare Radar — Worldwide Overview, dark
Dark-first data palette. Same two hues as the light capture. On charcoal the darker series is the one fighting the ground. Delta indicator. The one colour that reads the same on both grounds, because it is carrying meaning rather than identity. Categorical series palette. Four categories, four fixed hues, held across both grounds. Which one dominates the eye is not held.
Worldwide Overview, dark September 11, 2026 Public site, signed out; no version string exposed medium · dark · desktop-web
The same page and the same figures, captured minutes apart on the other ground. Only the promotional strip at the top differs, and it rotates. Radar is worth the pair because it does not restate its palette in the dark: the hues are the same, and what changes is how much light each one carries against what is behind it. In the traffic chart the dark blue that reads as the heavier of the two series on white is now the one closest to the background, and the pale blue that was the quiet one carries the chart. The stacked attack bars show the milder version of the same thing—WAF still holds the largest share and still looks it, but the lighter segment beside it pulls more attention than its 39.7% has earned. The red on the browser deltas is the one colour that reads the same on both grounds, which is what you want from a colour carrying meaning and what a colour carrying identity cannot promise.
  • Dark-first data palette Same two hues as the light capture. On charcoal the darker series is the one fighting the ground.
  • Categorical series palette Four categories, four fixed hues, held across both grounds. Which one dominates the eye is not held.
  • Delta indicator The one colour that reads the same on both grounds, because it is carrying meaning rather than identity.
Cloudflare Radar — Worldwide Overview
Multi-page dashboard. Eleven sections behind one rail, with the open one expanded in place. Radar is a site of dashboards, not a dashboard. Compare periods. The dotted series is the previous seven days, drawn on the same axis rather than beside it. Delta indicator. Eight shares with their change under them, all of them fractions of a point, which tells you how still this data is. Overview then detail. Two summaries and an arrow each. The panel exists to tell you whether the full page is worth opening. Ratio and rate. Shares only, never counts, and both sides of the split are named so the denominator is never in doubt. Stacked composition. Four mitigation techniques to 100%. The bar is almost redundant next to the printed figures, which is the point. Ranked list. A top ten with no magnitudes at all. The rank is the whole finding.
Worldwide Overview September 11, 2026 Public site, signed out; no version string exposed medium · light · desktop-web
Radar is a dashboard for people who did not come to use a dashboard. The audience is journalists, researchers and the merely curious, nobody has an account, and the design follows from that in two ways worth copying. Two controls scope the whole page—where, and when—and neither is a filter in the sense the rest of this gallery means it; the only other selector on the page sits inside the traffic panel. Everything else that looks like a control is a link. Each panel is a standing summary of a section that has its own full page behind the arrow in its heading, so the overview works as a table of contents rather than a filtered view of one dataset. And almost every value is printed as text above the chart that encodes it: "Bot 57.9%, Human 42.1%" sits over the bar rather than inside it. You can read the number without reading the chart, which is the right trade when most of your readers will take one figure and leave.
  • Multi-page dashboard Eleven sections behind one rail, with the open one expanded in place. Radar is a site of dashboards, not a dashboard.
  • Compare periods The dotted series is the previous seven days, drawn on the same axis rather than beside it.
  • Overview then detail Two summaries and an arrow each. The panel exists to tell you whether the full page is worth opening.
  • Ratio and rate Shares only, never counts, and both sides of the split are named so the denominator is never in doubt.
  • Stacked composition Four mitigation techniques to 100%. The bar is almost redundant next to the printed figures, which is the point.
  • Ranked list A top ten with no magnitudes at all. The rank is the whole finding.
  • Delta indicator Eight shares with their change under them, all of them fractions of a point, which tells you how still this data is.

Grafana

Grafana — Grafana SLO / SLO Overview, loading
Loading and skeleton state. The space twenty-eight rows are about to fill, holding nothing. When they land, everything below them moves. Loading and skeleton state. A spinner and the word Loading. Correct that work is happening, silent about what is arriving or how much.
Grafana SLO / SLO Overview, loading September 11, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; captured 1.2s after navigation) sparse · dark · desktop-web
The same SLO Overview as the other Grafana capture, 1.2 seconds after navigation. This is the whole loading state: the nav rail, and the words "Loading …" centred in an otherwise empty canvas. No skeleton, no panel frames, nothing occupying the space the twenty-eight rows are about to take. I tried to catch an intermediate frame and there isn't one—at 3.5 seconds the page is complete. It goes from nothing to everything, so the layout arrives all at once and anything a viewer had started reading moves. The entry asks for three things here and this delivers one. It is distinguishable from broken and from empty, because a spinner clearly means working. It does not occupy the final space. And whether it fails into an error state rather than spinning forever is not something a screenshot can answer, which is its own small argument for showing the shape of what is coming.
  • Loading and skeleton state A spinner and the word Loading. Correct that work is happening, silent about what is arriving or how much.
  • Loading and skeleton state The space twenty-eight rows are about to fill, holding nothing. When they land, everything below them moves.
Grafana — Examples / Alert List
Alert rule attached to panel. Seven rules in six naming conventions. Nothing in the list conveys severity or subject. Alert rule attached to panel. Firing for 17 days. Still actionable, in principle; nobody has acted for two and a half weeks. Semantic status color. Pending rather than firing: the threshold is met and the duration isn't. Two states, both named. Drill-down. The route from an alert back to the rule that defined it, on every row. Filter bar. "1 instance, 24 hidden by filters"—the list saying what it is not showing you.
Examples / Alert List September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
Seven alerts, and the durations are the story. "Browser market share > 50%" has been firing for 17 days, 15 hours and 12 minutes. Two more have been firing for over three days. An alert that has been true for two and a half weeks is not telling anyone anything—it has become part of the background, and the list it sits in is now a list you scroll past. The other thing worth reading is the names. Six alerts, six conventions: a full sentence, a metric identifier in snake case, a camel-case service name, a two-word phrase, and two that just say "Dynamic". Somebody arriving at this list at three in the morning cannot tell from the names what is broken or how badly, which is work the naming could have done for free.
  • Alert rule attached to panel Seven rules in six naming conventions. Nothing in the list conveys severity or subject.
  • Alert rule attached to panel Firing for 17 days. Still actionable, in principle; nobody has acted for two and a half weeks.
  • Semantic status color Pending rather than firing: the threshold is met and the duration isn't. Two states, both named.
  • Filter bar "1 instance, 24 hidden by filters"—the list saying what it is not showing you.
  • Drill-down The route from an alert back to the rule that defined it, on every row.
Grafana — Demo / Annotations
Annotation. Fifty deploy markers on a 24-hour chart. Each one is correct and together they are a picket fence. Annotation. The same events as a list, tagged release and timestamped. Readable in a way the chart is not. Time-range picker. Twenty-four hours, which is what sets the marker density. An hour here would be three lines. Filter bar. The tag filter that makes this survivable, already on. The chart above is the filtered version.
Demo / Annotations September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
The header on this dashboard says annotations "appear as vertical lines and icons on all graph panels—events visible at a glance", and the panel directly beneath it is the counter-example. Roughly fifty red dashed lines across twenty-four hours, evenly spaced, and the request-rate series behind them is genuinely hard to follow: the fence is denser than the data. Every one of those lines is a real event correctly recorded, and the tag filter in the top left is switched on, so this is the filtered view. That is the whole problem with automatic annotations—they are complete and they never stop arriving, and completeness at this cadence is indistinguishable from noise. The list panel at the bottom is what makes them usable again: the same events, four of them, timestamped and tagged, in a form you can read.
  • Annotation Fifty deploy markers on a 24-hour chart. Each one is correct and together they are a picket fence.
  • Annotation The same events as a list, tagged release and timestamped. Readable in a way the chart is not.
  • Filter bar The tag filter that makes this survivable, already on. The chart above is the filtered version.
  • Time-range picker Twenty-four hours, which is what sets the marker density. An hour here would be three lines.
Grafana — Where The Cool Dashboards Live / Chicago L Trains
Data table. The raw feed under the board, including the rgb string each line colour came from. Wallboard mode. The next train, three times the height of the rest. Readable at ten feet with no pointer. Panel grid. Rows two to four at a third the size. Panel size is carrying the priority. Freshness indicator. A countdown rather than a clock time, which is the right call and hides how old the feed is. Semantic status color. Green for on time, next to green for the Green Line. One hue, two unrelated jobs, one row.
Where The Cool Dashboards Live / Chicago L Trains September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) sparse · dark · wall
A live departures board for one platform, built out of stat panels against the CTA Train Tracker API, and it is the clearest wallboard in the gallery: four rows, type large enough to read across a concourse, no chrome inside the board and nothing to hover. The next train gets three times the height of the three behind it, which is the layout saying "start here" without a word of copy. The interesting problem is the colour. Pink, Green and Orange are the CTA's own line colours, inherited from the world outside the screen and already known to every rider—which is the best possible reason to use a palette. But the status chip beside them is also green when a train is on time, so on the second row "Cottage Grove" is green because it is the Green Line and "On Time" is green because it is on time, side by side, meaning two unrelated things.
  • Wallboard mode The next train, three times the height of the rest. Readable at ten feet with no pointer.
  • Panel grid Rows two to four at a third the size. Panel size is carrying the priority.
  • Semantic status color Green for on time, next to green for the Green Line. One hue, two unrelated jobs, one row.
  • Freshness indicator A countdown rather than a clock time, which is the right call and hides how old the feed is.
  • Data table The raw feed under the board, including the rgb string each line colour came from.
Grafana — Examples / Dashboard Variables
Categorical series palette. Twelve-plus hostnames differing only in the middle digits, with twelve-plus colours to match. Data table. Four columns visible, the fourth cut mid-word, with no horizontal scroll offered. Template variable. Six selectors bound to every panel's query, with the chosen values carried in the URL. Explain this metric. Names a hidden variable set to pizza. Prose is doing the work a control should. Filter bar. Values as removable chips rather than a dropdown saying Instance (3).
Examples / Dashboard Variables September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
Six selectors across the top and the page is unusually honest about what they cost. The middle panel says there is a hidden variable called bestfood, currently set to pizza, which has no control anywhere on screen—state affecting the page that a viewer cannot see or change. The overview panel says that setting Instance and then changing the Prometheus source will clear your selection, because the two variables are chained and the second one invalidates the first. Both of those are correct behaviour and both are the reason parameterised pages get distrusted. What the top row gets right is the display: Instance and CPU Usage Type show their selected values as chips with an × rather than as a count, so what is filtering the page is legible without opening anything.
  • Template variable Six selectors bound to every panel's query, with the chosen values carried in the URL.
  • Filter bar Values as removable chips rather than a dropdown saying Instance (3).
  • Explain this metric Names a hidden variable set to pizza. Prose is doing the work a control should.
  • Categorical series palette Twelve-plus hostnames differing only in the middle digits, with twelve-plus colours to match.
  • Data table Four columns visible, the fourth cut mid-word, with no horizontal scroll offered.
Grafana — Examples / Gauge
Semantic status color. 40.8, 20 and 48.6 all arc red. The threshold fires for everything, so it says nothing. Gauge and dial. Seven arcs to report that seven disks agree. This is the area argument in one panel. Sequential and diverging scales. The arc runs pink through green with no perceptual order, so position on it means nothing without the number. Sparkline. A sparkline inside the arc: the same series encoded twice in one square. Threshold line and region. The coloured band around the rim is the threshold, drawn as a region rather than a line.
Examples / Gauge September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
Nine gauges, and the page makes Few's argument against them without meaning to. The panel at bottom left holds seven arcs reading 30.6, 30.8, 30.8, 30.9, 30.9, 31.0 and 31.3 GB. Seven squares, seven needles, to say that seven disks are all about the same. The same seven values as a bullet graph would be seven short bars in a fraction of the height, and the one that was different would be obvious rather than requiring you to read each label. What the gauges do carry is a bounded range where the endpoints mean something, which is the case the pattern survives: these are percentages and capacities, not rates. The panel beside them is where it stops working—three circular gauges at 40.8, 20 and 48.6 GB, all with a red arc, so a value and another value two and a half times larger get the same verdict.
  • Gauge and dial Seven arcs to report that seven disks agree. This is the area argument in one panel.
  • Sparkline A sparkline inside the arc: the same series encoded twice in one square.
  • Sequential and diverging scales The arc runs pink through green with no perceptual order, so position on it means nothing without the number.
  • Semantic status color 40.8, 20 and 48.6 all arc red. The threshold fires for everything, so it says nothing.
  • Threshold line and region The coloured band around the rim is the threshold, drawn as a region rather than a line.
Grafana — Examples / Geomap
Sequential and diverging scales. Density, with a ramp whose radius parameter changes the apparent story and isn't shown. Geo map with markers. Satellite imagery under the same markers, competing with the data instead of receding. Legend and series toggle. A legend reading 'Layer 1'. It holds a corner of the panel and identifies nothing. Geo map with markers. Markers as small dots. Green on dark grey at four pixels is near the contrast floor.
Examples / Geomap September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
Four maps of the same flight data, and the base map does more damage than any of the data settings. On the three dark panels the markers are small green dots on dark grey, which at this size is close to the contrast floor; on the satellite panel they are small green dots on terrain that is already green, brown and blue, and they effectively disappear. The base layer is supposed to be context and recede, and imagery is the loudest option available. The density layer along the bottom is the honest one: it stops pretending individual points resolve, and the clusters on both coasts read immediately. Its radius is doing a great deal of unlabelled work, though, and the blobs merge into clouds at a setting nobody can see. Three of the four panels also carry a legend that says "Layer 1", which is a legend occupying a corner and naming nothing.
Grafana — Examples / Histogram
Sequential and diverging scales. A gradient fill down each bar, encoding nothing. The height already carried the count. Time series. The source series, before any bucketing. Two modes are not visible here either. Histogram and distribution. Automatic buckets on that series: clearly bimodal, humps at roughly 27 and 30.4. Histogram and distribution. The same data at bucket size 3. Four bars, one hump, and no sign that anything was lost. Histogram and distribution. A different series at the default count, showing a long left shoulder and a small second mode at 50.5.
Examples / Histogram September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
This page accidentally contains the cleanest demonstration of the bucket problem I have found in a shipped product. The panel top right is the source series, a line oscillating between 24 and 32. Directly under it, the same series on automatic buckets: roughly twenty-four bars, and it is plainly bimodal, with one hump around 27 and a taller one at 30.4. To the left of that, labelled "Force timeseries into bucket size=3", is the identical data at a bucket width of three. Four bars. One hump. The second mode has not been smoothed or de-emphasised, it is simply gone, and nothing about the chart indicates that a decision was made. Neither panel is wrong. One of them answers "is this one population or two" and the other cannot, and the only difference between them is a number in a field.
Grafana — Examples / Logs Panel
Drill-down. The trace ID: the route out of the wall of text and into the request that produced it. Stacked composition. Volume by level over time. The bottom band sits on a flat baseline; the two above it are approximate. Log tail. Raw lines, truncated at the right edge, with two timestamps in two timezones on every row.
Examples / Logs Panel September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
The arrangement is the standard one and it is right: a stacked volume chart by log level across the top, then the raw stream underneath, so the shape of the traffic and the individual lines share one page. Two details are worth stopping on. Every line carries two timestamps in two timezones—the gutter reads 2026-09-10 18:36:58.435 in the browser's local time, and the JSON three characters later reads 2026-09-11T01:36:58.434956621Z in UTC. Same instant, seven hours apart, on the same row, and nothing labels either one. The second is the trace ID in the expanded panel at the bottom, which is the thing that makes a log line usable: it is the route from a line of text to the request it came from. Two of the three entries shown carry the identical trace ID, which is also the case deduplication exists for.
  • Stacked composition Volume by level over time. The bottom band sits on a flat baseline; the two above it are approximate.
  • Log tail Raw lines, truncated at the right edge, with two timestamps in two timezones on every row.
  • Drill-down The trace ID: the route out of the wall of text and into the request that produced it.
Grafana — Examples / Node graph panel
Service map. Nodes for services, edges for calls, both from instrumentation rather than from a diagram. Semantic status color. One node: two numbers inside and a success/error ring around it. Four measures, no verdict. Legend and series toggle. Four series named for a graph with seven nodes, which is the legend doing more work than the map. Zoom and pan on time. The only route to the nodes pushed off the right edge, and it doesn't move the rest of the page.
Examples / Node graph panel September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) sparse · dark · desktop-web
Seven services, and the panel is already too small to hold them. Three nodes are cut in half by the right edge and at least one more is somewhere past it, which is the force layout doing what force layouts do to a graph with more nodes than room. That is the hard part of this pattern and it is visible here at a scale of seven. Each node also carries four things at once: a number, a second number, and a ring split between a green arc and a red one. The legend names all four. A topology view where every node reports four measures is a view you read node by node, which is the opposite of what a map is for —one derived state per node is scannable in a second and drills into the rest. Here almost every ring is mostly red, so the channel that could have carried that state is saturated and distinguishes nothing.
  • Service map Nodes for services, edges for calls, both from instrumentation rather than from a diagram.
  • Semantic status color One node: two numbers inside and a success/error ring around it. Four measures, no verdict.
  • Legend and series toggle Four series named for a graph with seven nodes, which is the legend doing more work than the map.
  • Zoom and pan on time The only route to the nodes pushed off the right edge, and it doesn't move the rest of the page.
Grafana — Examples / Polystat Visualization Showcase
Host map. Hexagons sharing edges. Adjacent unhealthy cells merge into one shape, which is the point of the tiling. Host map. The same data as circles: a gap around every cell, so nothing clusters. Semantic status color. A closed set of three—OK, warning, critical—applied as the whole cell fill. Ranked list. Sorted descending so the worst cell lands where the eye starts. No share of total, and no row for the rest. KPI tile. Name-only mode: two cells carrying a label, a colour and no number at all.
Examples / Polystat Visualization Showcase September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
The plugin's own description is the host map pattern stated plainly —"visualise hundreds of metric series as a grid of coloured polygons" and "spot anomalies across your entire fleet at a glance"—and the shapes gallery halfway down says all six shapes "apply the same threshold colouring; choose the one that fits your layout." The page then disproves its own claim. The hexagon panels tile with every neighbour sharing an edge, so three cells read as one block. The circle panels leave a gap between every pair, so three cells read as three things you have to compare one at a time. At six cells that difference is a preference. At three hundred it is the difference between a cluster you see and a cluster you assemble, which is why the shape is a structural choice rather than a styling one.
  • Host map Hexagons sharing edges. Adjacent unhealthy cells merge into one shape, which is the point of the tiling.
  • Host map The same data as circles: a gap around every cell, so nothing clusters.
  • Semantic status color A closed set of three—OK, warning, critical—applied as the whole cell fill.
  • Ranked list Sorted descending so the worst cell lands where the eye starts. No share of total, and no row for the rest.
  • KPI tile Name-only mode: two cells carrying a label, a colour and no number at all.
Grafana — Grafana SLO / SLO Overview
Small multiples. A column of sparklines, each on its own axis. One runs 0–200%, the next 96–100%. Metric targets. The budget column: the derived quantity that turns a target from a binary into a rate. Error and stale state. No data, in the same red as a breach. A third state wearing the second one's colour. Target and progress. Budget left, −1900%. Past −100% the number is measuring the objective, not the service. Header KPI strip. Five tiles counting targets, objectives and series. None of them says whether any of it is met.
Grafana SLO / SLO Overview September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) dense · dark · desktop-web
Twenty-eight objectives, each a row carrying a 28-day indicator, the budget remaining, and a sparkline. The budget column is where it comes apart. Four rows read −1900%, −1815%, −1093% and −463%. A budget is the amount of failure an objective permits, so it bottoms out at −100% and everything past that is the display reporting how wrong the target was rather than how broken the service is. Those four sit in the same column, in the same type, as a row reading 99.8%. Two rows above them an objective reports "No data" in the same red, which is a third thing again and looks like the second. Meanwhile eleven rows sit at exactly 100.0% with a full budget—objectives that cannot fire. The sparkline column is scaled per row, so one row's axis runs 0 to 200% and its neighbour's runs 96 to 100, and the shapes are not comparable down the page even though the layout invites exactly that.
  • Metric targets The budget column: the derived quantity that turns a target from a binary into a rate.
  • Target and progress Budget left, −1900%. Past −100% the number is measuring the objective, not the service.
  • Error and stale state No data, in the same red as a breach. A third state wearing the second one's colour.
  • Small multiples A column of sparklines, each on its own axis. One runs 0–200%, the next 96–100%.
  • Header KPI strip Five tiles counting targets, objectives and series. None of them says whether any of it is met.
Grafana — Examples / Stats, light theme
Sparkline. The area fills under each value drop to near-white here, so the shape that was legible on charcoal is a smudge. Dark-first data palette. The same six values as the dark capture. Bright-on-charcoal became pale-on-white, and the contrast went with it. Grayscale with alerts. Ninety green rectangles, identical in both themes. Nothing here can read as abnormal on either ground. Dark-first data palette. 63.8 GB in pale orange on white. On the dark version the identical colour was the readable one. Semantic status color. Whole-tile fills survive the switch, because the text sits on the colour rather than being the colour.
Examples / Stats, light theme September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; ?theme=light) dense · light · desktop-web
The same dashboard as the dark Stats capture, same data, same palette, one URL parameter apart. Put them side by side and the palette turns out to have been designed on charcoal. On the dark version the value colours carry because they are brighter than the ground—reds, oranges and greens against near-black. Here they have to carry by being darker than the ground instead, and the same hues arrive as pale pink and pale salmon. Look at the Color value panel: six numbers at 30-odd pixels, and 93.5, 88.7, 93.4, 81.6, 77.6 and 87.9 are all light pink on white. The column on the right is worse, because 63.8 GB lands on pale orange. Nothing about the theme switch is broken, and nothing was chosen for this ground. That's the whole argument for designing the dark case first and deriving the other one: the constrained case should set the lightness range, and here the unconstrained one did.
  • Dark-first data palette The same six values as the dark capture. Bright-on-charcoal became pale-on-white, and the contrast went with it.
  • Dark-first data palette 63.8 GB in pale orange on white. On the dark version the identical colour was the readable one.
  • Semantic status color Whole-tile fills survive the switch, because the text sits on the colour rather than being the colour.
  • Grayscale with alerts Ninety green rectangles, identical in both themes. Nothing here can read as abnormal on either ground.
  • Sparkline The area fills under each value drop to near-white here, so the shape that was legible on charcoal is a smudge.
Grafana — Examples / Stats
Header KPI strip. Six tiles sharing one anatomy, which is the arrangement that reads as a row rather than as six things. KPI tile. Label, value, unit and a sparkline behind it. No delta, no base, no window. Dark-first data palette. The dark half of the pair. The same six values in the light capture arrive as pale pink on white. Semantic status color. No text at all. Colour is the only carrier, which is the WCAG failure stated as a feature. Sparkline. A column of them, each scaled to its own series, which is the comparison Tufte warns the arrangement invites. KPI tile. Thirty numbers with no labels—the value with nothing attached to it. Grayscale with alerts. Seven rows, seven different colours, no resting state. Nothing here can read as abnormal. Semantic status color. Whole-tile background colour: the loudest channel available, spent on all six.
Examples / Stats September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) dense · dark · desktop-web
A showcase rather than a working dashboard, which is what makes it useful: it is Grafana demonstrating every visual option the stat panel has, in one place, with nothing else competing. Two things are worth reading it for. The first is that across roughly sixty tiles here, not one carries a comparison. Every option on display is about how the number looks—background colour, value colour, orientation, text mode, grid packing—and none is about what the number should be measured against. The panel type that most needs a delta and a base is being shown off without either. The second is the colour. Every single tile on this page is coloured, and the "No text" panel is ninety-odd green rectangles carrying no label and no value at all, which is colour as the sole carrier of meaning at its purest. Both of those are reasonable for a catalogue of options and neither survives being copied onto a real page.
  • KPI tile Label, value, unit and a sparkline behind it. No delta, no base, no window.
  • Dark-first data palette The dark half of the pair. The same six values in the light capture arrive as pale pink on white.
  • Sparkline A column of them, each scaled to its own series, which is the comparison Tufte warns the arrangement invites.
  • Semantic status color Whole-tile background colour: the loudest channel available, spent on all six.
  • Grayscale with alerts Seven rows, seven different colours, no resting state. Nothing here can read as abnormal.
  • KPI tile Thirty numbers with no labels—the value with nothing attached to it.
  • Semantic status color No text at all. Colour is the only carrier, which is the WCAG failure stated as a feature.
  • Header KPI strip Six tiles sharing one anatomy, which is the arrangement that reads as a row rather than as six things.
Grafana — Examples / State timeline and Status history
Semantic status color. A closed set of two, both labelled. The clearest case on the page of colour plus a word. Sequential and diverging scales. One mark per sample, green through red by temperature—so green here means cold, not good. Status history. Continuous regions with the state name written inside each one. Threshold line and region. Thresholds turning a numeric series into discrete bands: under 50, 50, 300. Time series. The same query as the panel above, untranslated. Three traces you have to threshold yourself.
Examples / State timeline and Status history September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
The most useful thing on this page is an accident of layout: the third panel down the left column draws three series as state bands, and the panel directly underneath draws the identical query as an ordinary time series. Same data, stacked one above the other. The line chart is three tangled traces oscillating between 57 and 64, and reading it means picking a series, tracing it, and thresholding it in your head. The state timeline above has already done that and shows the conclusion, and the blue stretches—below fifty—are findable without being looked for. That is the whole argument for the encoding, and Grafana has put the before and after in adjacent panels. Worth noticing too that every coloured region here carries its word inside it. LOW, HIGH, NORMAL, CRITICAL, True, False. Colour is never the only carrier on this page.
  • Status history Continuous regions with the state name written inside each one.
  • Threshold line and region Thresholds turning a numeric series into discrete bands: under 50, 50, 300.
  • Time series The same query as the panel above, untranslated. Three traces you have to threshold yourself.
  • Sequential and diverging scales One mark per sample, green through red by temperature—so green here means cold, not good.
  • Semantic status color A closed set of two, both labelled. The clearest case on the page of colour plus a word.
Grafana — Examples / Table
Data table. In-cell bar gauge clipped to a sliver, and text truncated mid-word with no escape to the full value. Data table. Threshold colour filling the cell, which makes a column scannable without being read. Sequential and diverging scales. A continuous ramp down a sorted column: the table doing a heatmap's job. Semantic status color. Value mappings turning raw levels into a closed set, each with its word in the cell. Delta indicator. Pills reading up, down and down fast: direction with no magnitude and no base. Also page 1 of 72.
Examples / Table September 10, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) dense · dark · desktop-web
Seven tables demonstrating what a cell can hold, and the range is the point: a threshold colour on the whole cell, a continuous gradient down a column, an image, a bar rendered inside the cell, a pill, and a markdown block carrying three metrics at once. Two of them stop working at this size. The bar gauge column on the right is squeezed to a sliver about six pixels wide, so the encoding that was supposed to make magnitude visible carries nothing, and the catch-phrase column beside it truncates mid-word with no way to see the rest. The bottom-left table is the one to look at hardest. It is sorted, it has column headers you can click, and the pager under it reads page 1 of 72. Any sort applied there is a sort of the page unless the query re-runs, and nothing on screen tells you which of those is happening.
  • Data table Threshold colour filling the cell, which makes a column scannable without being read.
  • Sequential and diverging scales A continuous ramp down a sorted column: the table doing a heatmap's job.
  • Data table In-cell bar gauge clipped to a sliver, and text truncated mid-word with no escape to the full value.
  • Semantic status color Value mappings turning raw levels into a closed set, each with its word in the cell.
  • Delta indicator Pills reading up, down and down fast: direction with no magnitude and no base. Also page 1 of 72.
Grafana — Grafana Heatmaps
Small multiples. Nine panels, one variable changed. The comparison is the content. Time series. The source series. Every heatmap on the page is built from this. Heatmap. Linear y buckets, which is the default and the one that hides the low end. Sequential and diverging scales. Every panel carries its own ramp legend, 1 to 30, so the colour is readable per panel but not across them.
Grafana Heatmaps September 9, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) dense · dark · desktop-web
Grafana's own teaching dashboard for the heatmap panel, and it teaches well because it holds the data constant and varies exactly one thing. The top-left panel is the source series. The eight heatmaps are all those same numbers under different y-bucket scales: linear, log2, log10, each with and without a split, two of them clamped to a 700-15k range. Read across the grid and the argument makes itself. The linear version crushes almost everything into a band near the bottom of the axis; the log versions spread the same distribution across the full height and the dense region moves. Same data, different readings, and nothing on any single panel tells you which bucketing you're looking at except the title someone remembered to write.
  • Time series The source series. Every heatmap on the page is built from this.
  • Heatmap Linear y buckets, which is the default and the one that hides the low end.
  • Small multiples Nine panels, one variable changed. The comparison is the content.
  • Sequential and diverging scales Every panel carries its own ramp legend, 1 to 30, so the colour is readable per panel but not across them.
Grafana — Linux node / fleet overview
Empty state. No data, centred, with no distinction from a genuine zero. Header KPI strip. Three status tiles across the top, before any chart. Error and stale state. Red, and it names the cause: no metrics received, check configuration. Freshness indicator. The tile whose job is 'as of when', reporting No data instead. Data source badge. Integration version, the only tile on the row still able to answer.
Linux node / fleet overview September 9, 2026 Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · dark · desktop-web
Captured while Play's demo data source was returning nothing, which makes this a better example of empty and error states than of the fleet overview it is meant to be. Three things are worth noticing. The top-left tile is red and reads "No metrics received - Check configuration", which is an actual diagnosis and the best thing on the page. The tile beside it exists to report when data last arrived, and it says "No data", so the freshness indicator has no freshness to report and doesn't say why. And every chart below says "No data" while the network panel says "No errors". A viewer scanning this page cannot tell from the words alone whether the network is clean or whether it is as unknown as everything else, which is the exact confusion the empty-state pattern exists to prevent.

Netdata

Netdata — Anomalies / Anomaly advisor
Anomaly band. Not a band. An anomaly rate as its own series, so one chart covers every metric instead of one band per chart. Empty state. "You haven't highlighted any timeframe yet"—the reason for the blank, and the action that fills it. Cross-filter. Highlight a timeframe and the page names which metrics drove it. The selection is the query. Explain this metric. Every section carries a sentence saying what it counts, directly under its heading rather than behind an icon. Share and embed. Generate report, top right. Whether the highlighted window travels with it is the question the button raises.
Anomalies / Anomaly advisor September 11, 2026 Netdata Agent, Anomaly advisor (public registry node, signed out) medium · dark · desktop-web
Netdata answers the anomaly problem without drawing a band at all, and the difference is worth recording. Rather than shading an expected range around each series, it scores every metric continuously and plots the result as its own series: the percentage of dimensions currently anomalous, and beneath it the count. Both sit near zero for most of the window and spike to about 0.04% at five separate moments. The trade is clear once you see it. A band tells you whether this metric is behaving, on the same axes as the metric, and needs one per chart. A rate tells you whether anything at all is behaving, in one chart, and cannot tell you which thing without a second step—which is what the panel at the bottom is for, and why it currently reads "You haven't highlighted any timeframe yet." The finding requires a brush selection before it will name a single metric.
  • Anomaly band Not a band. An anomaly rate as its own series, so one chart covers every metric instead of one band per chart.
  • Explain this metric Every section carries a sentence saying what it counts, directly under its heading rather than behind an icon.
  • Cross-filter Highlight a timeframe and the page names which metrics drove it. The selection is the query.
  • Empty state "You haven't highlighted any timeframe yet"—the reason for the blank, and the action that fills it.
  • Share and embed Generate report, top right. Whether the highlighted window travels with it is the question the button raises.
Netdata — Metrics / System
Header KPI strip. Twelve tiles in two rows, in four different layouts. It reads as twelve things rather than one strip. Sidebar and canvas. The rail is the dashboard. A generated tree of every metric family the agent found. Gauge and dial. Arcs for disk reads and writes, where the maximum is invented—this is a rate, not a capacity. Dashboard builder. A query builder inline in the panel header: group by, aggregation, node and dimension count. Search across panels. 720 charts, so search is the navigation and the tree is the filing system nobody browses. Semantic grouping. Sections generated by the collector rather than chosen. Consistent, and about nothing in particular. Compare periods. Offered per chart rather than per dashboard, which is the scoping trap: one panel shifted, the rest not. Freshness indicator. Live 1, Stale 8. Most products would have drawn all nine and said nothing.
Metrics / System September 10, 2026 Netdata Agent v2.10.0-686-nightly (public registry node, signed out) dense · dark · desktop-web
Structurally the opposite of Grafana, and worth the comparison. Nobody built this page. The right rail says "showing 720 of total 720 charts" and the tree beneath it—System, Compute, Memory, Storage, Network, Hardware, Processes, then Apps, Users, Groups, O/S Services, and every application it found—is generated from what the agent collects. The canvas is the same hierarchy rendered downward, four levels deep, headings prefixed with dashes: System, then Compute, then CPU, then the chart. There is no editorial layer at all, which means nothing is missing and nothing is prioritised. The header also does something most products won't: it reports "Live 1, Stale 8" beside the node count, so eight of the nine machines behind this view are not currently reporting and the page says so rather than drawing their last known values.
  • Sidebar and canvas The rail is the dashboard. A generated tree of every metric family the agent found.
  • Search across panels 720 charts, so search is the navigation and the tree is the filing system nobody browses.
  • Header KPI strip Twelve tiles in two rows, in four different layouts. It reads as twelve things rather than one strip.
  • Gauge and dial Arcs for disk reads and writes, where the maximum is invented—this is a rate, not a capacity.
  • Semantic grouping Sections generated by the collector rather than chosen. Consistent, and about nothing in particular.
  • Freshness indicator Live 1, Stale 8. Most products would have drawn all nine and said nothing.
  • Dashboard builder A query builder inline in the panel header: group by, aggregation, node and dimension count.
  • Compare periods Offered per chart rather than per dashboard, which is the scoping trap: one panel shifted, the rest not.
Netdata — Metrics / System › Compute › CPU
Gauge and dial. Six arcs. Two are percentages where the endpoints mean something; four are rates in KiB/s and kbit/s on an invented maximum. Collapsible row. Four levels of section, depth carried by leading dashes. Generated by the collector, and never edited. Legend and series toggle. The legend is a value table: steal 0.1, softirq 0, user 1.5113, system 0.9, iowait 0.1, each with its own bar. Dashboard builder. A query builder in every chart header, so the panel is a live query rather than a saved configuration. Overview then detail. System › Compute › CPU. The breadcrumb is the only thing telling you where in 720 charts you are.
Metrics / System › Compute › CPU September 10, 2026 Netdata Agent (public registry node, signed out) dense · dark · desktop-web
Further down the same generated page, and the section nesting is the thing to look at: "− Compute", then "−− CPU", then "−− Pressure Stall Information (PSI)", then "−−− CPU", then "−−−− Some Pressure". Four levels, each collapsible, each named by the collector rather than by a person, and the depth is signalled with leading dashes because there was no design pass to give them a hierarchy in type. It is consistent and completely unedited. Every chart also carries its own query builder in the header—group by, aggregation, node count, dimension count, sample interval—so a panel here is a live query you can re-scope in place rather than a saved configuration. Worth noting what is not in this shot: the sidebar has an Anomaly Rate toggle, switched off, and Netdata's answer to the anomaly problem is a separate derived rate per chart rather than a band drawn around the series. This capture shows the control, not the thing it draws.
  • Collapsible row Four levels of section, depth carried by leading dashes. Generated by the collector, and never edited.
  • Gauge and dial Six arcs. Two are percentages where the endpoints mean something; four are rates in KiB/s and kbit/s on an invented maximum.
  • Legend and series toggle The legend is a value table: steal 0.1, softirq 0, user 1.5113, system 0.9, iowait 0.1, each with its own bar.
  • Dashboard builder A query builder in every chart header, so the panel is a live query rather than a saved configuration.
  • Overview then detail System › Compute › CPU. The breadcrumb is the only thing telling you where in 720 charts you are.