Filters let you narrow what a dashboard (or an individual widget on it) shows, without creating a whole new dashboard just to look at a subset of your infrastructure.
Common filter types
- Host group — limit the view to a specific group of hosts (for example, "Core Switches" or "Web Servers")
- Site / location — useful once you're monitoring more than one physical site or region
- Status / severity — show only hosts or services that are Down, Critical, or Warning, hiding everything that's healthy
- Time range — the window a graph, alert feed, or availability figure covers (last hour, last 24 hours, last 7 days, or a custom range)
Applying filters
Most dashboards have a filter bar at the top that applies to every widget on the page at once — this is the quickest way to, for example, temporarily focus a whole dashboard on just one site during an incident.
Individual widgets can also carry their own filter, set independently of the dashboard-level filter, in the widget's own settings. This is useful when most of a dashboard should stay broad, but one specific widget (say, a performance graph) needs to stay locked to a particular host regardless of what else is filtered.
Saving filter presets
If you find yourself applying the same combination of filters repeatedly (for example, "Down or Critical, last 24 hours, Site B only"), save it as a preset so you can reapply it in one step instead of rebuilding it every time.
Filters are non-destructive — they only change what's displayed, not the underlying monitoring configuration, so it's safe to experiment with them on any dashboard without affecting your actual monitoring setup.