Build a dashboard using the Infinity data source

A Grafana dashboard is a set of one or more panels, organized and arranged into one or more rows, that provide an at-a-glance view of related information. These panels are created using components that query and transform raw data from a data source into visualizations.

A data source can be an SQL database, Grafana Loki, Grafana Mimir, or an API endpoint. It can even be a basic CSV file. Data source plugins take a query you want answered, retrieve the data from the data source, and reconcile the differences between the data model of the data source and the data model of Grafana dashboards.

The instructions in this milestone are based on the publicly available Traffic density CSV file, which has the following structure.

csv Copy

created_at,entry_id,field1,field2
2025-04-07 12:19:26 UTC,18706390,6.000000,20.000000
2025-04-07 12:19:41 UTC,18706391,4.000000,19.000000
2025-04-07 12:19:56 UTC,18706392,8.000000,25.000000

To build a dashboard with the Infinity data source, complete the following steps:

1. From the navigation menu, click Dashboards.

2. Click New and select New dashboard.

3. Open the panel editor by doing one of the following:

   • If you see an Add visualization button or placeholder, click it.
   • If you see a + icon in the top toolbar, click it and select Visualization.

   Either option opens the panel editor.

4. In the query section at the bottom of the screen, click the Data source dropdown and search for your Infinity data source.

5. Select your Infinity data source from the list.

6. In the Type dropdown, select CSV.

7. Set Method to GET.

8. In the URL field, enter the URL of your CSV data.

   For example: https://thingspeak.com/channels/38629/feed.csv

9. Expand Parsing options & Result fields.

10. Under Advanced Options, set the Delimiter field to ,.

11. Click Add Columns and add a column for each field:

    • Column Name created_at / Title Created at / Format as Time
    • Column Name field1 / Title Density of Westbound Cars / Format as Number
    • Column Name field2 / Title Density of Eastbound Cars / Format as Number

12. In the right pane, click All visualizations, search for Table, and select it from the results.

13. Click Back to dashboard in the top-left of the panel editor.

14. In the toolbar, click Save dashboard.

15. Enter a name for your dashboard and click Save.

The dashboard is now available for others to see.

More to explore (optional)

At this point in your journey, you can explore the following paths:

• Modify dashboard settings
• Manage dashboards
• Filtering data / Using template variables in Query