Dashboards and the Datadog UI Tour

The idea in one sentence

Every view in Datadog — Infrastructure, Metrics Explorer, Logs Explorer, APM, Dashboards — is filtered and scoped with the same tag syntax, so once you know env/service/version from the previous lesson, you already know how to navigate all of them.

Where you’ll actually look at data

Five views cover almost everything you’ll do day to day:

• Infrastructure List / Host Map — every host or container Datadog knows about, as a sortable list or a colored grid (the Host Map), colorable by any metric (CPU, memory) and filterable by tag.
• Metrics Explorer — build ad-hoc graphs over any metric, sliced by tag, without committing to a saved dashboard — this is where you go to answer “what does this number actually look like right now.”
• Logs Explorer — search and filter indexed log events, build facets out of log attributes, and pivot straight from a log line to its trace if trace injection is set up.
• APM Traces / Services — the Services list shows every service tag value Datadog has seen traces for, with latency/error/throughput at a glance; drilling into one service shows its traces and its place in the service map.
• Dashboards — curated, saved collections of widgets, built once and reused by the whole team.

flowchart TD
    Filter["Tag filter: env:prod service:orders-api"] --> Infra["Infrastructure List / Host Map"]
    Filter --> Metrics["Metrics Explorer"]
    Filter --> Logs["Logs Explorer"]
    Filter --> APM["APM Traces / Services"]
    Filter --> Dash["Dashboards"]

One tag filter, five views

Ordered vs. free dashboards

Datadog Dashboards come in two layout types, and picking the right one up front saves a lot of rework later:

• Ordered — widgets stack automatically in the sequence you add them, top to bottom. You don’t manage pixel positions; you manage a list. This is the right default for most dashboards — fast to build, easy to reorder, and it reflows sanely on any screen size.
• Free — you place each widget manually with explicit x, y, width, and height coordinates, giving you a fixed, deliberate layout — useful for a status-board-style dashboard meant to be viewed on a big screen where visual grouping matters more than convenience of editing.

// A widget on a free dashboard carries explicit layout coordinates
{
  "definition": { "type": "timeseries", "title": "orders-api error rate" },
  "layout": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "width": 6, "height": 3 }
}

// The same widget on an ordered dashboard has no layout block —
// its position is just its position in the widgets array
{
  "definition": { "type": "timeseries", "title": "orders-api error rate" }
}

If you’re not sure which one you need, start with ordered — you can always widen a widget or split it into two, and you never have to hand-tune coordinates just to add one more graph.

Notebooks

Notebooks are a lighter-weight alternative to a Dashboard for a different job: telling a story, not maintaining a live status board. A Notebook mixes graphs, log queries, and free-text markdown in one scrolling document — the natural place to write up an incident timeline (“here’s the latency graph during the spike, here’s the deploy marker, here’s what we concluded”), a postmortem, or a one-off investigation you want to hand to a teammate. Unlike a Dashboard, a Notebook is meant to be read top to bottom once, not glanced at repeatedly.

Same tags, every view

The reason all of this hangs together: Infrastructure, Metrics Explorer, Logs Explorer, APM, and Dashboards all accept the exact same tag filter syntax — env:prod, service:orders-api, version:1.4.2, combined with AND/OR as needed. Set up unified service tagging correctly (previous lesson) and the same three-value filter narrows every one of these views down to “this deployable unit, this environment, this release” — which is the whole reason this course spent an entire lesson on tagging before ever touching dashboards.

🐶 The one-line takeaway

Infrastructure List/Host Map, Metrics Explorer, Logs Explorer, APM, and Dashboards are five different lenses over the same tagged data — pick ordered dashboards by default (stacked, low-maintenance) and free only when you need pixel-exact placement, reach for a Notebook when you’re telling a story instead of maintaining a live view, and navigate all five with the same env/service/version tag filters.

Which view would you open to see every service Datadog has traces for, with latency/error/throughput at a glance?

Host Map Metrics Explorer APM Services list Notebooks

What is the key difference between an ordered dashboard and a free dashboard?

Ordered dashboards cannot contain log widgets Ordered widgets stack automatically in sequence; free widgets are placed manually with x/y/width/height Free dashboards cannot be shared with a team Ordered dashboards only work for APM data

When is a Notebook the better tool than a Dashboard?

When you need a live status board for a big screen When you are writing a narrative, like an incident timeline mixing graphs and text When you need pixel-exact widget placement When you only want to look at host-level metrics

Why can you use the same env:prod AND service:orders-api filter in the Logs Explorer and in APM?

Because logs and traces are stored in the same database table Because both views accept the same tag filter syntax over telemetry tagged consistently by unified service tagging Because APM automatically imports all logs Because Logs Explorer ignores tag filters

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