There is an option to create custom variables and give CSV values for them which appear in the drop-down selection of Grafana Dashboard. These variables become the input to the queries which are templatized. Sometimes, the variable values are not readable but they mean something. Example: If a dashboard is displaying stats of a city then the queries would have a condition like city_id: $city_id where $city_id is replaced by the custom variable which represents the city id 12345. Instead of having to display the id (12345), I want to display the names of the cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, etc
