docs: add Best practices for creating dashboards page (#5449, #5445)#6340
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Creates explore-analyze/dashboards/dashboards-best-practices.md as the
single, opinionated source of dashboard design guidance for {{kib}}.
Covers the 48-column grid, grid packing rules, information hierarchy,
per-chart sizing with concrete row counts, panel titling, panel-type
selection, three reusable layout patterns (Operational, Analytical,
Executive), and performance tuning.
Adds discoverability pointers from related pages so the page lives
naturally in the dashboards ecosystem:
- Dashboards overview and Building dashboards (parent hubs)
- Create a dashboard, Organize dashboard panels (UI-side how-tos),
with the resize bullet linking to the grid section
- Create dashboards programmatically (API context for packing rules)
- Lens overview and Text panels (visualization authoring entry points)
- All 13 individual Lens chart pages, in the existing "Customize the
chart to follow best practices" build step
Replaces the external EUI dashboard-good-practices link in
line-charts.md with the new internal page, since dashboard guidance
is now first-party.
Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
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This was referenced May 7, 2026
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Vale Linting ResultsSummary: 2 warnings found
|
| File | Line | Rule | Message |
|---|---|---|---|
| explore-analyze/dashboards/create-dashboard.md | 19 | Elastic.QuotesPunctuation | Place punctuation inside closing quotation marks. |
| explore-analyze/dashboards/dashboards-best-practices.md | 28 | Elastic.Spelling | 'wireframe' is a possible misspelling. |
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Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
- Information hierarchy: add focal point and proximity bullets - Title and label panels: add number formatting and repeated-word bullets - New section: Use color deliberately (palette choice, sequential vs divergent, color count, brand customization) - New section: Apply consistent dashboard settings (margins, sync color palettes, sync cursor and tooltips), pointing to create-dashboard.md for the full list Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
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Summary
Adds a single, opinionated guidance page for designing effective {{kib}} dashboards, and routes existing pages to it instead of fragmenting the same advice across many places.
This PR closes both #5449 (grid documentation) and #5445 (dashboard design best practices). It replaces the earlier #6329 and #6330, which split the guidance across multiple pages. Both have been closed in favor of this consolidated approach.
What's new
explore-analyze/dashboards/dashboards-best-practices.md(new). Sections:Discoverability pointers added
explore-analyze/dashboards.md— adds the page to the Build and customize dashboards list.explore-analyze/dashboards/building.md— closing pointer after the related-tasks list.explore-analyze/dashboards/create-dashboard.md— pointer in the page intro.explore-analyze/dashboards/arrange-panels.md— pointer in the intro and from the resize bullet, linking to#dashboard-grid.explore-analyze/dashboards/create-dashboards-programmatically.md— pointer at the end of the Dashboards API section, framed for API authors who set panel coordinates by hand.explore-analyze/visualize/lens.md— pointer near the intro for panel titles, axis labels, and dashboard sizing.explore-analyze/visualize/text-panels.md— pointer near the intro, anchored to#choose-panel-type.area,bar,gauge,heat-map,line,metric,mosaic,pie,region-map,tables,tag-cloud,treemap,waffle) — pointer added to the existing Customize the chart to follow best practices build step.explore-analyze/visualize/charts/line-charts.md— replaces the existing external EUI Dashboard good practices link with the new internal page.explore-analyze/toc.yml— adds the page under Building dashboards, after Organize dashboard panels and before Duplicate a dashboard.Sourcing of opinionated guidance
The numbers and patterns come from the
kibana-dashboardsandkibana-vegaagent skills in elastic/agent-skills-sandbox, reframed for a docs audience and verified against the {{kib}} source where applicable:DASHBOARD_GRID_COLUMN_COUNT = 48insrc/platform/plugins/shared/dashboard/common/page_bundle_constants.ts.DEFAULT_PANEL_WIDTH = DASHBOARD_GRID_COLUMN_COUNT / 2insrc/platform/plugins/shared/dashboard/common/constants.ts.Resolves
Replaces