The Grafana Polystat Panel plugin is designed to consolidate multiple metrics and provide drilldowns to other dashboards, focusing on creating a panel for Cassandra using data from Prometheus collected from Kubernetes clusters. The tutorial explores creating a panel that displays CPU, memory, and disk utilization metrics, allowing users to group these metrics into an overall health status. It covers how to use simple PromQL queries, set thresholds for metrics, create composites to display combined metrics, and implement clickthroughs to navigate to detailed dashboards. The guide also discusses enhancing dashboard flexibility with Grafana template variables and concludes with a preview of more advanced features in the upcoming Part 2.