Monitoring Dashboard Audit

Monitoring Dashboard Audit

Structured assessment of monitoring infrastructure for network operations. Evaluates Grafana dashboards, PromQL query efficiency, alert rule configuration, SLA/SLO reporting accuracy, and Prometheus data source health. This skill reads monitoring configuration and metrics — it does not create, modify, or delete dashboards, alerts, or data sources.

Reference references/cli-reference.md for Grafana and Prometheus API commands organized by audit step, and references/query-reference.md for PromQL patterns covering network interface utilization, error rates, BGP peer state, and SNMP-derived metric evaluation.

When to Use

• Monitoring gap assessment — verifying that all critical network infrastructure has dashboard coverage and active alerting
• Dashboard quality review — evaluating whether existing Grafana dashboards present accurate, actionable data to operations teams
• Alert fatigue investigation — audit when teams report excessive or irrelevant alert notifications that mask genuine incidents
• SLA/SLO compliance review — validating that error budget calculations and availability metrics reflect actual service delivery
• Pre-migration monitoring readiness — confirming monitoring will survive infrastructure changes (new devices, topology changes, platform migrations)
• Post-incident review — assessing whether monitoring detected the incident, how quickly alerts fired, and what gaps allowed silent failures

Prerequisites

• Grafana access — API token or service account with Viewer role minimum (grafana_url and Authorization: Bearer <token> header confirmed working)
• Prometheus access — HTTP API reachable at prometheus_url/api/v1/status/config (no authentication required by default, or appropriate auth header configured)
• Network scope defined — device inventory, subnet ranges, and critical service list available for coverage gap analysis
• Baseline documentation — existing SLA/SLO targets, expected alert thresholds, and operations runbooks available for comparison
• Timestamp awareness — confirm NTP synchronization across monitoring stack; Prometheus scrape timestamps and Grafana time range selections depend on consistent clocks

Procedure

Follow these six steps sequentially. Each step produces findings that feed the monitoring coverage scorecard and optimization recommendations in Step 6.

Step 1: Dashboard Inventory

Enumerate all Grafana dashboards to establish the monitoring surface area and identify coverage gaps, stale dashboards, and organizational issues.

Query the Grafana API to list all dashboards with metadata:

GET /api/search?type=dash-db&limit=5000

For each dashboard, record: uid, title, folder, tags, and last-updated timestamp. Identify dashboards not updated in over 180 days as staleness candidates — these may reference deprecated metrics or decommissioned infrastructure.

Examine folder organization. Flat folder structures with 50+ dashboards at root level indicate organizational debt. Check for naming convention adherence — dashboards without consistent prefixes or tags reduce discoverability during incidents.

Retrieve the full JSON model for each dashboard:

GET /api/dashboards/uid/<uid>

Record panel count, data source references, and template variables. Flag dashboards with hardcoded time ranges (no relative time selector) and panels referencing nonexistent data sources — these produce empty panels that erode operator trust.

Build a coverage matrix: map dashboard panels to infrastructure inventory. Devices, interfaces, or services present in inventory but absent from any dashboard represent monitoring blind spots.

Step 2: Panel and Query Analysis

Evaluate PromQL query efficiency, panel threshold configuration, and visualization appropriateness across all dashboards.

Extract all PromQL expressions from dashboard panel JSON targets. For each query, assess:

Rate function usage — rate() requires a range vector at least two scrape intervals wide. Replace irate() in dashboard panels that display trends over long time ranges — irate() only uses the last two data points and is appropriate only for volatile, short-window displays.

Recording rule candidates — Complex queries repeating across multiple dashboards (same expression in 3+ panels) should be recording rules. Identify these by hashing normalized PromQL expressions. Common candidates: interface utilization calculations, error rate ratios, and aggregated availability metrics.

Label cardinality — Queries aggregating across high-cardinality labels without explicit filtering generate expensive computation. Flag queries with no label matchers on high-cardinality metrics and queries using {__name__=~".*"} patterns.

Panel thresholds — Verify gauge and stat panels have threshold values configured. Panels displaying utilization or error rates without color-coded thresholds fail to provide at-a-glance severity. Compare configured thresholds against operational standards (e.g., interface utilization warning at 70%, critical at 90%).

Visualization appropriateness — Time series data on gauge panels loses temporal context. Single-value stats for volatile metrics mislead operators. Table panels with 100+ rows without sorting are unusable during incidents.

Step 3: Alert Rule Validation

Assess alert rule configuration for detection coverage, threshold accuracy, and notification reliability.

Retrieve all alert rules from the Grafana alerting API:

GET /api/v1/provisioning/alert-rules

For Prometheus-native alerting, also query:

GET /api/v1/rules?type=alert

For each alert rule, evaluate:

Threshold appropriateness — Alert thresholds should align with operational impact, not arbitrary percentages. Interface utilization alerts at 50% on a 10Gbps link are premature; at 95% on a 100Mbps WAN link they are late. Cross-reference thresholds against link capacity and historical peak usage from Prometheus.

Evaluation intervals — Alert rules evaluated every 5 minutes cannot detect sub-minute outages. For critical infrastructure (WAN links, core routers), evaluation intervals should match or be less than the Prometheus scrape interval. Flag alert groups where evaluation interval exceeds the scrape interval of the underlying metrics.

Pending and for durations — for: 0s alerts fire on transient spikes and contribute to alert fatigue. for: 30m on critical infrastructure means 30 minutes of unnotified outage. Recommended ranges: Critical alerts for: 2m-5m, Warning alerts for: 5m-15m.

Notification channels — Verify all alert rules have at least one active notification channel. Check channel health — Slack webhooks return 200, PagerDuty keys are valid, email SMTP is reachable.

Routing and silencing — Review Alertmanager routing tree for catch-all routes dumping all alerts to a single channel. Verify silences have expiration times. Active silences without expiration mask ongoing problems indefinitely.

Escalation completeness — Critical alerts should escalate from Slack/email to PagerDuty/phone after acknowledgment timeout. Alert rules with only Slack notification for Critical-severity failures lack escalation depth.

Step 4: SLA/SLO Reporting

Validate that SLA/SLO dashboards and calculations reflect actual service delivery accuracy.

Error budget calculation — Verify the formula: error_budget_remaining = 1 - (actual_errors / allowed_errors). Common mistakes: using the wrong time window (calendar month vs rolling 30 days), excluding planned maintenance from downtime calculations, or computing availability from a single data source when the service spans multiple components.

Availability SLIs — Check that uptime percentage, MTTR (Mean Time to Repair), and MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) use correct inputs. Uptime should reference probe-based measurement (blackbox exporter, synthetic checks), not just device-reported status. MTTR excluding detection time understates actual recovery duration.

Burn rate alerting — Multi-window burn rate alerting provides early warning when error budget consumption accelerates. Verify burn rate alerts use at least two windows (e.g., 1-hour and 6-hour). A single-window alert either fires too late or too often. Check that severity maps to budget consumption: a 14.4x burn rate over 1 hour warrants page-level severity.

Multi-window alert patterns — Confirm long-window alerts (6h, 3d) for trend detection and short-window alerts (5m, 1h) for rapid response. Verify severity increases with burn rate magnitude.

Step 5: Data Source Health

Assess Prometheus scrape target status, metric cardinality, retention configuration, and remote write health.

Scrape target status — Query the targets API:

GET /api/v1/targets?state=active

Check the up metric across all scrape targets. Targets with up == 0 are failing to scrape — investigate network reachability, exporter health, or authentication issues. Targets with scrape_duration_seconds exceeding the scrape interval are timing out, producing gaps in metrics and potentially triggering false alerts.

Cardinality assessment — Query TSDB status:

GET /api/v1/status/tsdb

Identify the top 10 metrics by series count. Network environments commonly see cardinality explosion from per-interface SNMP metrics on large chassis devices. Metrics exceeding 10,000 active series per name warrant investigation for label optimization or aggregation.

Retention and storage — Verify retention period covers the longest SLA reporting window. A 15-day retention with 30-day SLA dashboards produces incomplete reports. Check WAL size — a WAL larger than 20% of total TSDB size may indicate write amplification from high churn.

Remote write health — If Prometheus uses remote write (Thanos, Cortex, Mimir, VictoriaMetrics), check remote storage lag metrics. Lag exceeding 5 minutes means long-term store is behind real-time. Flag failed sample counters as write failures creating data gaps.

Metric naming conventions — Verify metrics follow Prometheus naming conventions: snake_case, unit suffixes (_bytes, _seconds, _total), base units. Inconsistent naming makes dashboard authoring error-prone and cross-device comparison unreliable.

Step 6: Monitoring Coverage Report

Compile findings into a structured monitoring coverage scorecard with prioritized optimization recommendations.

Coverage scorecard — Rate each infrastructure category (core routers, distribution switches, WAN links, firewalls, load balancers) on a 1–5 scale: 1 = no monitoring, 2 = basic up/down only, 3 = utilization dashboards, 4 = dashboards with alerting, 5 = dashboards with alerting and SLO tracking.

Alert quality assessment — Compute alert quality metrics: alert-to-incident ratio, mean time to acknowledge, silence frequency per alert rule. High-noise alerts (>80% silenced or acknowledged-without-action) are candidates for threshold adjustment or removal.

PromQL optimization recommendations — For each inefficient query from Step 2, provide current and optimized expressions. Prioritize recording rule creation for queries appearing in 3+ panels.

Threshold Tables

Decision Trees

Monitoring Audit Entry Point:
├─ Dashboard completeness unknown? → Start at Step 1 (Inventory)
├─ Alert fatigue reported? → Start at Step 3 (Alert Validation)
├─ SLA disputes or inaccurate reports? → Start at Step 4 (SLA/SLO)
├─ Missing metrics or gaps in graphs? → Start at Step 5 (Data Source)
└─ General health check? → Full procedure Steps 1–6

Panel Query Optimization:
├─ Query returns no data?
│  ├─ Metric name exists in TSDB? → Check label matchers
│  └─ Metric absent? → Critical: exporter or scrape config broken
├─ Query is slow (>10s execution)?
│  ├─ High cardinality labels? → Add label matchers or aggregate
│  ├─ Wide time range on raw metric? → Use recording rule
│  └─ Regex label matcher? → Replace with exact match where possible
└─ Query returns unexpected values?
   ├─ rate() on non-counter metric? → Use gauge-appropriate function
   └─ Aggregation missing labels? → Add by/without clause

Alert Threshold Calibration:
├─ Alert never fires? → Threshold too high or metric absent
│  ├─ Metric present and collecting? → Lower threshold based on P95
│  └─ Metric absent? → Fix scrape target first (Step 5)
├─ Alert fires constantly? → Threshold too low or for duration too short
│  ├─ for: 0s? → Add minimum pending duration
│  └─ Threshold below normal baseline? → Raise to P95 + margin
└─ Alert fires but team ignores it? → Alert fatigue
   ├─ >80% silenced? → Remove or retarget alert
   └─ Low signal-to-noise? → Increase for duration or add inhibition rule

Report Template

# Monitoring Dashboard Audit Report

## Executive Summary
- **Scope:** [Grafana instance URL, Prometheus endpoints, device count]
- **Assessment date:** [date]
- **Dashboard count:** [total dashboards / active / stale]
- **Alert rule count:** [total rules / firing / pending / inactive]
- **Coverage score:** [average across infrastructure categories, 1–5 scale]

## Coverage Scorecard
| Category | Dashboards | Alerts | SLOs | Score |
|----------|------------|--------|------|-------|
| Core Routers | [count] | [count] | [Y/N] | [1-5] |
| Distribution | [count] | [count] | [Y/N] | [1-5] |
| WAN Links | [count] | [count] | [Y/N] | [1-5] |
| Firewalls | [count] | [count] | [Y/N] | [1-5] |

## Alert Quality Metrics
| Metric | Value | Target |
|--------|-------|--------|
| Alert-to-incident ratio | [ratio] | <5:1 |
| Mean acknowledgment time | [duration] | <15m |
| Silence frequency (30d) | [count] | decreasing trend |
| Escalation coverage | [%] | 100% for Critical |

## Findings by Severity

### Critical
| # | Domain | Finding | Impact | Recommendation |
|---|--------|---------|--------|----------------|

### High
| # | Domain | Finding | Impact | Recommendation |
|---|--------|---------|--------|----------------|

### Medium / Low
[Grouped findings table]

## PromQL Optimization Recommendations
| Dashboard | Panel | Current Query | Recommended | Cost Reduction |
|-----------|-------|---------------|-------------|----------------|

## SLA/SLO Accuracy Review
| Service | Reported Availability | Validated Availability | Discrepancy |
|---------|----------------------|-----------------------|-------------|

## Appendix
- Full dashboard inventory with staleness dates
- Scrape target health summary
- Cardinality top-10 metrics

Troubleshooting

Grafana API returns 401/403 — Verify the API token has Viewer permissions. Service accounts require Viewer role on all folders containing in-scope dashboards. Admin-level tokens are not required for read-only audit.

Prometheus API unreachable — Check network connectivity and reverse proxy configuration. Verify the base URL includes the correct path prefix if Prometheus runs behind a subpath.

Empty dashboard inventory — Grafana API search returns paginated results. Increase the limit parameter or paginate. Folder-level permissions can hide dashboards from restricted tokens.

PromQL queries reference absent metrics — SNMP exporter metric names change between exporter versions. Check exporter version and generator configuration when dashboards return no data.

Cardinality data not available — The TSDB status endpoint requires Prometheus 2.14+. If unavailable, estimate cardinality using count queries, though these are expensive on large installations.

SLA calculations differ from business reports — Time zone handling is the most common cause. Prometheus stores UTC timestamps. Verify all SLA dashboards use explicit UTC time ranges or a consistent time zone variable.

Alert rules exist in both Grafana and Prometheus — Grafana Unified Alerting coexists with Prometheus-native alerting. Audit both sources to avoid duplicate or conflicting coverage. Document which system is authoritative for each alert category.