Very new to Grafana dashboard and have some super basic questions on how to get started

Hi! So I’m a BI Developer who has been working for years with Tableau and Power BI. My company decided to use Grafana as a BI tool (though I suspect that is not Grafana’s forte) and I’m having a hard time launching myself off the ground. I have a few really basic questions that I wonder if someone might be able to answer, keeping in mind that I am totally new to this.

I am pulling from an AWS Athena data lake.

First of all, and this is a silly one, but I’m wondering what how specific it wants you to be in your SQL query. Theoretically we should be able to full a few columns from a table and then in the viz be able to pick and choose but I’m finding myself having to do really specific queries that only pull the, say, two columns I want to see in order to get anything to pop up. Am I doing it wrong or is that how it’s supposed to work?

Second of all, the x and y axis thing. If I’m doing a SELECT with two columns how can I tell it what is x and what is y? Does one of them have to be a time series? If one has to be a time series I suspect THAT is why you can’t pick because a time series will always be on the x but again, I’m not sure if it’s me or if it’s them

Another question is about interactivity. This is where I think specific SQL queries will really trip you up (as opposed to pulling a whole table); because it won’t know how they’re connected. Is interactivity supposed to be automatic (like in Power BI) or something you need to set up (like in Tableau)?

I also have a question about axis labels. They are totally unreadable if you have more than, say, 15 columns. I don’t see any way to fix it and that’s very inconvenient

I also want to know if there are user-friendly filters that can be applied by end users, like drop down menus or the like. I didn’t see that anywhere

Thanks so much in advance for your help!

Welcome to the Light Side

We migrated like you from both tableau and powerbi to grafana. We have never looked back.
It is just a matter of time, once you get a few visualizations going you will love it.

So let’s start with a basic bar graph.
Can you please post a schema (table name and columns and data types is there are such things in aws athena) you are querying and we can take from there.

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