How-To: Dashboard Design Best Practices and Templates

Dashboards are all about targeted communication. Data visualization allows you to strategically choose the widgets that best emphasize your key metrics.

This article provides best practices for designing effective dashboards and offers templates for common use cases including security surveillance, network monitoring, compliance tracking, and operational monitoring.

Best Practices for Dashboard Design

When building dashboards, follow these principles to create effective and user-friendly visualizations:

  • Start with clear objectives for each dashboard.

  • Group related widgets.

  • Place most important widgets at top.

  • Use consistent time ranges.

  • Use consistent sizing.

  • Include descriptions.

  • Add drill-down capabilities.

  • Include filtering options.

  • Optimize queries for performance.

  • Use appropriate visualizations for data types. For more information, see How-To: Selecting Widgets Based on Query Output.

Basic Dashboard Organization

A typical dashboard organization follows this structure:

This layout follows the principle of progressive disclosure: start with the big picture and progressively reveal more detail as users scroll down. For a detailed example of this approach with a specific query, see How-To: Visualizing the Same Query With Different Widgets.

Security Surveillance Dashboard Templates

The following templates show how security surveillance dashboards can be organized for different monitoring purposes:

Note

The key to effective security surveillance dashboards is combining the right queries and visualizations to provide clear, actionable insights while maintaining performance and usability.

Threat Detection Dashboard
Network Traffic Dashboard
Endpoint Security Dashboard
Compliance Monitoring Dashboard
Authentication Monitoring Dashboard
Network Security Dashboard

Other Dashboard Use Cases

Besides security surveillance, LogScale Dashboards can also be used for:

  • IT Operations Monitoring

  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

  • DevOps Monitoring

  • Infrastructure Monitoring

  • Business Analytics

  • Compliance and Audit

  • Network Operations

  • IoT/Device Monitoring

  • Customer Experience Monitoring

  • Database Performance

  • Load Testing and Performance

Additional Resources

For more information about widgets, dashboards, and visualization, see: