Similar to managing data sources, there are several ways that you can add dashboards, listed as follows:

• By manually building your own
• By importing grafana.com community-driven dashboards
• By automatically provisioning previously stored dashboards

We'll be tackling the last way right now since the test environment is using this approach. We will focus on the other two methods in the following sections.

A dashboard file is a declarative representation of a dashboard, with all the required settings specified, and uses the JSON format. If you place it in the expected provisioning path, the Grafana service will pick it up at the start. In our example, we used the default path, as we can see in the following snippet:

vagrant@grafana:~$ ls /etc/grafana/dashboards/
node_exporter_basics.json

You can find this dashboard by going into the Home menu on the top left of the page and then selecting node_exporter_basics. This translates visually into the following screenshot: