TopolearnEvery panel on a dashboard is driven by the time range; knowing how to move around in time is the basic investigation skill.
The time picker (top right) sets one time range for the whole dashboard. Ranges are written in Grafana's relative syntax: now-6h to now is the last six hours, now/d rounds to the start of today, and now-1d/d to now-1d/d is all of yesterday. You can also type absolute timestamps or pick them on a calendar. The dashboard's timezone (browser, UTC or a named zone) is set in the picker and stored with the dashboard.
Moving around:
- Drag across a time series panel to zoom into that span; the whole dashboard follows.
- The zoom out button (or
tthenz) doubles the range; the arrows (tthen left or right) shift the window. - The range is part of the URL as
from=now-6h&to=nowor epoch milliseconds, so a copied link reproduces exactly what you see. The Share menu can lock the link to absolute time.
The refresh picker next to it re-runs all queries every 5s, 10s, 30s, 1m and so on. The allowed list and a server-wide floor (min_refresh_interval in grafana.ini) are configurable; a wall-screen dashboard refreshing every 5 seconds is a real load on the data source.
In Dashboard settings you can hide the picker, set a now delay (shift "now" back by, say, 1m so the last, still-incomplete data point isn't drawn as a drop), and save the current range as the dashboard default. A single panel can deviate from the dashboard with relative time and time shift in its query options, for example "last 24h, shifted 7d" to show the same panel one week earlier.
Example
# Relative range syntax (from -> to)
# now-6h now last 6 hours
# now-7d now last 7 days
# now/d now/d today (00:00 to 23:59:59)
# now-1d/d now-1d/d yesterday
# now/w now this week so far
# now-1M/M now-1M/M previous calendar month
# The range travels in the URL:
# https://grafana.example.com/d/abc123/api?from=now-6h&to=now&timezone=utc
# https://grafana.example.com/d/abc123/api?from=1760680800000&to=1760702400000
# grafana.ini: no dashboard may refresh faster than every 10s
[dashboards]
min_refresh_interval = 10sRemember
- now-6h, now/d and now-1d/d are the relative range syntax
- Drag on a graph to zoom; the range is in the URL so links reproduce the view
- Auto-refresh is load on the data source; set a now delay to hide the incomplete last point
Watch out for
- Sharing a link with from=now-1h during an incident; by the time someone opens it the interesting hour has scrolled away.