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Getting Started — Your First Weathermap

This guide walks you from an empty dashboard to a live weathermap showing traffic between two devices. It should take about 10 minutes. The screenshots below were taken on Grafana 12.4 with a Prometheus data source — other supported versions look nearly identical.

Prerequisites

  • Grafana 11.0.0 or later with the Network Weathermap NG panel installed (see Installation).
  • At least one data source (Prometheus, InfluxDB, Zabbix, or any Grafana-compatible source) returning time-series interface counters (e.g. bits/sec in and out of an interface).

1. Create the panel

  1. Open or create a dashboard and click Add → Visualization.
  2. In the visualization picker, search for Network Weathermap and select it.

Visualization picker with Network Weathermap NG

An Unsigned badge only appears on local development builds — the plugin installed from the Grafana catalog is signed.

You now have a weathermap canvas with a small starter map (two example nodes, Node A and Node B, already connected by a link) and, on the right, the panel options under Network Weathermap NG.

New weathermap panel with the starter map and options pane

The map has two states:

State How you get there What you can do
Edit mode The panel edit screen (where you are now) Add/move/delete nodes and links, drag VIAs, zoom
View mode A saved dashboard Hover for tooltips, click nodes/links that have dashboard links

2. Add your data queries

Weathermap doesn't query data itself — it reuses the panel's queries. In the Queries tab (below the panel), add the metrics you want to visualize. A typical link needs two series:

  • Outbound (A → Z) — e.g. interface bits sent
  • Inbound (Z → A) — e.g. interface bits received

Give queries readable names

Weathermap identifies a series by its display name. Use a query refId or a transform/legend so each series has a clear, unique name — you'll pick it from a dropdown later. In Prometheus, set Options → Legend → Custom on each query, as below.

Two queries with custom legends naming each direction

Here query A is the outbound series with legend SW-CORE to BKB-CARPINA, and query B is the inbound series with legend BKB-CARPINA to SW-CORE. Click Run queries so the panel sees the data.

3. Add your devices (nodes)

  1. In the panel options, open the Nodes section.
  2. Click Add Node (or pick one of the starter nodes from the dropdown). The node's form opens.
  3. Set its Label (e.g. SW-CORE) and, if you like, exact X/Y coordinates.
  4. Or simply drag the node on the canvas to position it. (Hold nothing — just click-drag in edit mode.)
  5. Repeat for a second device (e.g. BKB-CARPINA).

Editing the first node: label and position

Both devices named and positioned on the canvas

See Nodes (Devices) for icons, status coloring, and per-node tooltips.

  1. Open the Links section and click Add Link (or select the starter link from the dropdown).
  2. Set A Side to your first node and Z Side to the second.
  3. Under A Side Options, set A Side Query to your outbound series and, optionally, A Bandwidth # (or A Bandwidth Query) to the link capacity so utilization can be shown as a percentage.
  4. Under Z Side Options, set Z Side Query to your inbound series and its bandwidth.

Link A/Z sides with queries and 10 Gbps bandwidth set

The link now colors itself according to utilization, arrows show direction, and the live values render on the map (10000000000 = 10 Gbps capacity per side in this example). See Links for units, direction labels, and more.

5. Set the color scale

  1. Open the Color Scale section (panel options).
  2. Add thresholds mapping a percentage (or absolute value) to a color — for example 0% → green, 50% → yellow, 80% → orange, 95% → red.

Color scale thresholds in the panel options

Links and the legend now reflect these bands.

6. Save and use it

  1. Click Save dashboard, give it a name, and exit the panel editor.
  2. In view mode, hover a link to see a tooltip with usage, bandwidth, throughput %, and a mini time-series graph.
  3. Hover a node to see any extra metrics you configured.

Hovering the link in view mode: usage, bandwidth, throughput % and mini graph

Where to go next

  • Nodes (Devices) — icons, status colors, node tooltips, dashboard links
  • Links — queries, units, direction labels, port labels, parallel links, VIAs
  • Panel Options — background image, value display modes, timeline slider, tooltips
  • Interactions & Editing — pan/zoom/select on every OS, VIA editing, export
  • Use Cases — end-to-end scenarios (capacity planning, incident retros, floor plans)