Explore and modify resources

This section describes how to use the Grafana CLI to interact with Grafana resources directly from your terminal.

These commands allow you to browse, inspect, update, and delete resources without using the Grafana UI.

This approach is useful for advanced users who want to manage resources more efficiently or integrate Grafana operations into automated workflows.

Find and delete dashboards using incorrect data sources

In this example, we want to identify and remove production dashboards relying on non-production data sources.

The command below lists dashboard UIDs along with the data source UIDs used in their panels:

grafanactl resources get dashboards --context prod | jq '.items | map({ uid: .metadata.name, datasources: .spec.panels | map(.datasource.uid)  })'
[
   {
      "uid": "important-production-dashboard",
      "datasources": [
         "mimir-prod"
      ]
   },
   {
      "uid": "test-dashboard-from-dev",
      "datasources": [
         "mimir-dev"
      ]
   },
   {
      "uid": "test-dashboard-from-stg",
      "datasources": [
         "mimir-stg"
      ]
   }
]

We can then identify the dashboards that are using unexpected data sources, and delete them:

grafanactl resources delete dashboards/test-dashboard-from-stg,test-dashboard-from-dev
✔ 2 resources deleted, 0 errors

Edit remote resources

Resources can be edited directly from the default editor, without having to pull them first:

grafanactl resources edit dashboard/edit-me-please

This command will open the default editor as configured by the EDITOR environment variable (or fall back to 'vi' for Linux or 'notepad' for Windows).

Once the editor process terminates, the resource will be updated in the Grafana instance targeted by the current context.

Note

The edition will be cancelled if no changes are written to the file or if the file after edition is empty.