Add text and groupings to a dashboard

This document describes how you can add helpful information to a dashboard, and how you can group widgets on a dashboard. For example, you might want to add information about the dashboard, add links to relevant resources, or what to do in different situations. When a dashboard contains many widgets, you can improve the usability of the dashboard by grouping them.

For information about the Cloud Monitoring API, see Manage dashboards by API.

Before you begin

To get the permissions that you need to create and modify custom dashboards by using the Google Cloud console, ask your administrator to grant you the Monitoring Editor (roles/monitoring.editor) IAM role on your project. For more information about granting roles, see Manage access.

You might also be able to get the required permissions through custom roles or other predefined roles.

For more information about roles, see Control access with Identity and Access Management.
You can put up to 40 widgets on a dashboard.

Add text to a dashboard

The following screenshot illustrates a text box:

Example of a dashboard with a text widget.

The information in this section is for the Google Cloud console. For information about using the Cloud Monitoring API, see Dashboard with a Text widget.

To add a text box, do the following:

In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, and then select Dashboards, or click the following button:
Go to Dashboards
Select a dashboard or click Create dashboard.
In the toolbar, click Add widget.
In the Add widget dialog, go to the Layout section, and then select Text.
Add a title.
In the Content pane, enter the text you want displayed. The text box widget supports a limited set of Markdown commands:
- To create a header, use #. You can use multiple hash signs for different levels of headers:
```
  # Header
  ## Second heading
  ### Third heading
```
- To display italic font, use *italic* or _italic_.
- To display bold font, use **bold** or __bold__.
- To add a link, use [link text](absolute URL). You can use any value for the link text but you must use the absolute URL.
  
  For example, you could write [cloud.google.com](https://cloud.google.com/) to link to cloud.google.com.
Options: Use the fields in the Display pane to customize your content.
To save your changes, click Apply. To discard your changes, click Cancel.

Organize dashboard widgets

Custom dashboards let you specify the position of the charts, alerting policies, and other widgets. However, you can improve the usability of a dashboard that has many widgets by grouping them. A collapsible group widget is a container for other widgets, so you can view and manage those widgets as a collection. For example, a collapsible group widget might contain charts that display VM metrics and display alerting policies that monitor VMs.

To add a collapsible group widget, do the following:

In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, and then select Dashboards, or click the following button:
Go to Dashboards
In the Add widget dialog, go to the Layout section, and then select Collapsible Group.
To add a widget to the group, drag the widget to the group.

After you add widgets to the group, you can use your pointer to resize and reposition those widgets.
To add a descriptive title to the group, place your pointer on the widget to activate the toolbar, and then click Edit group.
Optional: To ensure the group is collapsed by default, place your pointer on the widget to activate the toolbar, and then click Collapse group.

When a collapsible group widget is collapsed, Monitoring retrieves the data for the widgets in the group at a lower priority than for other widgets. As a result, your dashboard loads more quickly.

To remove a widget from a collapsible group widget, you can delete the widget or drag it to unused space in the dashboard.

To remove the grouping, select the collapsible group widget, and in the widget's toolbar, select Cancel.

What's next

You can also add the following widgets to your custom dashboards:

For information about exploring charted data and filtering your dashboards, see the following documents: