As you can see from the following screenshot, the Dashboard gives us an overview of the current state of the Docker instance that Portainer is configured to communicate with:

In my case, this shows how many containers I have running, which at the moment is just the already running Portainer container, as well as the number of images I have downloaded. We can also see the number of Volumes and Networks available on the Docker instance.

It also shows basic information on the Docker instance itself; as you can see, the Docker instance is running Moby Linux, has two CPUs and 2 GB of RAM: this is the default configuration for Docker for Mac.

The Dashboard will adapt to the environment you have Portainer running in, so we will revisit it when we look at attaching Portainer to a Docker Swarm cluster.