Is it possible to build a single query, ie dataset and build multiple panels off of it? Or am I stuck copying/duplicating the same query to each panel for displaying slightly different metrics?
Have you looked into templating?
http://docs.grafana.org/reference/templating/
There’s a learning curve and each data source has a different query syntax to discover variable values, but with this you can repeat a panel and its query for each value of the variable. The variable can be server hostnames, filesystem mount points, or NICs.