# Primary Dashboards {% embed url="" %} Full-featured, interactive dashboards come standard with all Hosted Graphite [plans](https://www.hostedgraphite.com/signup/)! In addition to the steps below, we also have a comprehensive video tutorial on dashboard creation that can be seen [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jarOI0iRiD0). ### Create and Query To create a new dashboard, hover over the dashboard icon on the left-side menu and select `+ New Dashboard`. Then click the `+ Add Visualization` button to use the Query UI to search/select metrics from your datasource (default: HostedGraphite):

### Apply Functions Add a [Graphite function](https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/functions.html) to manipulate queries and represent your data in a way that is most meaningful to you. Below, we are demonstrating how to use **summarize()** to sum the data by 1hr intervals, **exclude()** to omit a metric pattern, and **aliasByNode()** to reformat the metric name:

### Customize Using the menu on the right, you can name the panel and modify the display stylings, axis, change the visualization type, add thresholds, units of measurement, etc:

### Timeframe To zoom in on each graph you can use the time range controls, highlight the section of a graph you wish to zoom in on, or define a custom timeframe. **NOTE**: each timeframe maps to an aggregation resolution (1h-10h ⇒ 30s data, 10h-5d ⇒ 300s, 5d-2y ⇒ 3600s). You can also set an auto-refresh rate to have your graphs update automatically - which is useful if you have a dedicated display for monitoring your graphs:

### Variables Click the 'settings' icon at the top, and click on 'Variables' then 'Add Variable'. Define a name, set the query type to 'Metric Name Query', and query your datasource (default is HostedGraphite) with a wildcard pattern (\*). You will also need to replace the query in your panel with your new variable name, prefixed with the dollar symbol ($). Now you can toggle between metric views that match your variables:

### Annotations Click the settings icon at the top, click 'Annotations' and then 'Add Annotation Query'. You will name your annotation, select your datasource (default: HostedGraphite), choose a color (default: red), and add a Graphite event tag. In most cases, you will need to copy a webhook key from one of our [Add-Ons](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/add-ons-and-integrations-guide) into the platform you wish to pull event annotations from. In this case, we have copied a webhook key into a Heroku account and are using the 'heroku' tag to display Heroku events as annotations:

### Organize and Manage To organize your panels in rows, simply click on the `Add` icon, click 'Row', and name the row. You can drag/drop panels into these collapsable rows, and then save the dashboard by clicking the 'floppy disk' icon at the top. Now your newly saved dashboard can be searched, starred, tagged, and added to a playlist:

### Create Unlimited Dashboards We provide a 14-day [free trial](https://www.hostedgraphite.com/accounts/signup/), where you can experiment with our beautiful hosted dashboards - with no installation or setup. [Book a demo](https://calendly.com/metricfire-sales/hostedgraphite-demo) and talk to us directly about how to build custom dashboards that will help you visualize your data in meaningful ways. For more information, check out some of our publications around monitoring Graphite data with our hosted dashboards on the MetricFire [blog](https://www.metricfire.com/blog/grafana-dashboards-from-basic-to-advanced/).