Templating

To make dashboard more interactive and dynamic, drop-down options can be provided. This allows user to quickly change the different input values and update the graphs and statistics.

Variables

Grafana supports variable definitions, which can then be used within queries. This allows for interactive dashboards as users can now use variable for filters such as server, channel etc instead of hard-coding the values.

Variable Types

Type	Description
Query	Allows dashboard developers to write a data source query that returns a list of metric names, tag values or keys.
Interval	Represent time spans.
Custom	Define the variable options manually using a comma separated list.
Constant	Define a hidden constant.
Text box	Display as a free text input field with an optional default value.

Refer to Grafana docs for more details on variable configuration