Grafana dashboards generator

We use this project at Showmax to generate JSON definitions of Grafana dashboards. Main motivation for the existence of this tool is to

• have a central place for keeping all dashboards in human readable code
• track changes with git
• be able to deploy dashboards to Grafana started in fresh container without need for persisting changes made into the container.

We use the awesome Prometheus for storing our metrics.

Using the generator

We are using the generator as a git submodule in our projects, which hold the actual configuration files. The typical configuration project contains:

• config.yml with dashboards definition
• Makefile for generating configuration and deploying generated dashboards to Grafana

Then the day-to-day use looks like:

1. edit config.yml
2. run make genconfig
3. if everything is happy, commit updated config.yml to git
4. run git push
5. run make deploy

Preparing configuration project

To start using grafana-dashboards-generator you should create a new git repository for holding your configuration. The process of starting a new project would look something like

mkdir company-awesome-dashboards && cd company-awesome-dashboards
git init
git submodule add git@github.com:ShowMax/grafana-dashboards-generator.git
cp grafana-dashboards-generator/Makefile.example Makefile
cp grafana-dashboards-generator/config.yml.example config.yml

You are now ready to edit Makefile to configure your deploy target. As well as edit config.yml to configure your awesome dashboards.

Deploying to Grafana

We have omitted deploy step from the Makefile as it will be environment specific. In general you need to POST generated files (which are located in dashboards directory) to Grafana. We have the following configuration in our Grafana Dockerfile:

export GF_DASHBOARDS_JSON_ENABLED=true
export GF_DASHBOARDS_JSON_PATH=/opt/showmax/grafana-dashboards/dashboards

And then just restart Grafana, so it reads new configuration.

TODO

List of things we would like to do see in the future versions:

• better error reporting if invalid configuration is passed
• graph_overrides to dashboard section and maybe something similar to seriesOverride as well

       graph_overrides:
           height: 500px
       will "inject" height for all graphs in this dashboard regardless of
           graph template

• expvars - allow list and instantiate expression for all values
• better inheritance of dashboard sections - inherit all rows and change/discard just few of them, inherit all expvars and override/discard just some of them, ditto for tags