At the end of November, we’ll be migrating the Sematext Logs backend from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch

Reactive grid layouts for dashboards

November 7, 2019

We love dashboards! Our goal is to help you troubleshoot faster and glean valuable insights from charts, counters, log tables, and more on a single screen, without losing track of your data. When you work with dashboards regularly you often find things to improve, often by resizing existing widgets, changing their placement, removing them, or adding new widgets. We had a look into various dashboard layout frameworks, each with a different approach to managing dashboard layouts. Here are the 3 most common ones:

    • Free placement of widgets.You can place any widget anywhere. When you start adding multiple widgets you start needing to move or resize other widgets. Because the placement and layout is completely up to you this process can be difficult and time-consuming.
    • Grid layout with rows and columns. You can place widgets by snapping them to grid cells. The layout might be limited to a defined number of rows and columns. Widgets always have the size of one or more grid cells in a row. Due to the fixed size of widgets, such a layout might waste a lot of precious space.
    • Reactive grid layout. Best of both worlds. You can easily place and resize widgets, while other widgets are adjusted automatically. A preview and automatic size adjustment help you drag and drop widgets quickly and precisely where you want them. The flexible widget sizing helps to create layouts with a higher density of information, using the screen optimally.

This reactive grid layout is exactly what you will now see your dashboards using! You can still save your dashboard layout, or revert any changes you made but don’t want to keep. Have a look at the video and give it a try!