Loading page
About this tool
Plan a service dashboard with the RED, USE or Four Golden Signals method: ordered panels, grid widths and starter queries.
A dashboard panel layout planner decides which panels a service dashboard needs and what order they appear in, using the RED method (Rate, Errors, Duration), the USE method (Utilisation, Saturation, Errors) or Google's Four Golden Signals. It sizes each panel against Grafana's 24-column grid, adds an SLO and error-budget row on top, and gives a starter PromQL query per panel. The output is a plan you can build against rather than a dashboard that grew one panel at a time.
Open Dashboard Panel Layout Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter a Service name, pick a Method — RED (Rate, Errors, Duration), USE (Utilisation, Saturation, Errors) or Four Golden Signals — set Panels per row (2, 3 or 4) and toggle the USE resources: CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, Network, Connection pool.
Set Panel height (grid units), a Refresh interval from 10 seconds to 5 minutes and the SLO target (%), with checkboxes to add the SLO / error-budget row and the logs / deploys drill-down row; the plan recomputes live.
Read the panel count, rows, panel size on the 24-column grid and queries per minute, then review 'Panel order, top to bottom' with a starter PromQL query per panel; Copy plan puts the numbered plan on the clipboard.
Panels come from RED, USE or the Four Golden Signals instead of whatever was easy to graph.
Widths divide Grafana's 24 columns evenly, so rows line up instead of leaving orphan gaps.
Shows how many datasource queries per minute the layout and refresh interval will cost.
RED describes requests, USE describes resources. RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) is Tom Wilkie's method for request-driven services like an HTTP API; USE (Utilisation, Saturation, Errors) is Brendan Gregg's method applied per resource — CPU, memory, disk, network, connection pool. Most real dashboards need both: RED at the top for the user's view, USE below for the cause.
Latency, traffic, errors and saturation, defined in chapter 6 of the Google SRE Book. They are effectively RED plus saturation, and the guidance is that if you can only measure four things about a user-facing system, measure these.
Keep the top screen to roughly six to nine panels, and the whole board under about 20. Past that, load time climbs and nobody can scan it during an incident — move the detail to a linked drill-down dashboard instead.
24 columns. A half-width panel is 12 columns, a third is 8 and a quarter is 6, which is why panels per row of 2, 3 or 4 tile cleanly and 5 does not. Height is measured in the same grid units, each about 30 pixels tall plus margin.