Instructions for developing a canvas dashboard in Rill

Introduction

Canvas dashboards are free-form dashboard resources that display custom chart and table components laid out in a grid. They enable building overview and report-style dashboards with multiple visualizations, similar to traditional business intelligence tools.

Canvas dashboards differ from explore dashboards in important ways:

• Explore dashboards: Best for explorative analysis, drill-down investigations, and letting users freely slice data by any dimension.
• Canvas dashboards: Best for fixed reports, executive summaries, or combining multiple metrics views into a single view.

Canvas dashboards are lightweight resources found downstream of metrics views in the project DAG. Each component within a canvas fetches data individually, typically from a metrics view resource.

When to use canvas dashboards:

• Building executive summaries with KPIs and multiple visualizations
• Creating report-style dashboards with markdown explanations