🚧 dac

dac is short for Dashboards as Code. It helps the developers to create the Grafana(for now) dashboards by a simple YAML file.

It's just a very simple wip project.

How it works

The main idea is to separate the metric queries from the Grafana dashboard JSON model and define the more simple dashboard model in YAML file. The dac will render the final Grafana dashboard JSON model by combining the two files.

The dashboard.yaml may look like this:

name: my-dashboard
version: v1alpha1
title: "My Dashboard"
style:
   # TODO(zyy17): The reference also can be a URL.
   reference: styles/my-dashboard-style.json
groups:
   - name: http-requests
     title: "HTTP Requests"
     isRow: false
     panels:
        - name: http-requests
          title: "HTTP Requests"
          description: "HTTP requests per second"
          queries:
             - expr: "rate(myapp_http_requests_total[$__rate_interval])"

How to use

1. Build the project

   make

   Then you will get the dac binary in the bin directory.

2. Run the example

   ./bin/dac -f examples/dashboard.yaml -o bin/dashboard.json

3. Use Grafana to import the dashboard.json file.

Next

There's a lot of work to do:

• The more complicated render engine
• The layout system(maybe we don't always need to modify the panels manually)
• Define a general and flexible spec of the dashboard model
• Integrate with the Grafana API
• Integrate with the K8s encosystem ...