I use grafanalib. I have a script that generates the dashboards depending on given parameters, then I store generated JSON as a k8s configmap that's mounted into the directory that's checked by grafana on startup. Might not be everyone's cup of tea but it is good enough for me.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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You can configure grafana without gui. That explain in https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/administration/provisioning/
To be precise, the page how to configure some things and how to upload the config. I also tried that.
The problem is in the dashboard jsons. They are not well documented (docs on specific plots are missing), and are a pain to edit (as any json).
The grafanalib tool I mentioned tries to help with that by implementing a sort of DSL for dashboards, but it is not ideal.
You can create graph on the UI and then export to json. To be honest, it's hard for me to imagine a situation where graphs need to be edited so often. After all, there are excellent template engines in Grafana itself. For quick look anyone can use Explore panel. Maybe I don't have so much data...
create graph on the UI
that's something I want to avoid
hard for me to imagine a situation where graphs need to be edited so often
the whole system is under development (trying new views, changing how the data is represented, etc), so I don't need to imagine it, I have it right in front of me ;)
Depending on what you’re comfortable with (and whether you want to integrate it with something else), maybe take a look at Altair? Especially nice is the declarative syntax of Vega-Altair.
It still has the limitations of JSON churn, but I find jsonnet to be a nice functional-style DSL in which to write grafana dashboards.