Grizzly Server

An HTTP Server for editing and reviewing

When we manage Grafana dashboards on disk, the “Grizzly Server” makes easy to edit and review these resources within an actual Grafana instance, but without needing to publish the dashboard to Grafana. Grafana provides the UI and datasources to make dashboards look right, Grizzly provides the dashboard, directly from local disk.

The Grizzly server is configured the same way as other Grizzly commands. See the configuration section) for more details.

Starting the Grizzly Server

The Grizzly server can be started with this command:

grr serve

This will start a server, by default listening on port 8080, but it will not have any resources available for you. It can be opened at http://localhost:8080. With the -b argument, Grizzly will open a browser window. With -p, you can change the port that the Grizzly server listens on.

The next sections will explain the four main scenarios for which the Grizzly server is useful.

Editing JSON or YAML files in Grafana

You can run Grizzly against one or more local files and it will start up an HTTP server:

grr serve examples/yaml/

By default, visit http://localhost:8080 to view the Grizzly server.

Reviewing changes to JSON or YAML files in Grafana

If you are editing the resources on disk, and just want to use Grafana for review, then use the inbuilt “watch” functionality. With the below, if any files are changed on disk within the directory identified, (here, examples/yaml), the dashboard will be reloaded within Grafana:

grr serve -w examples/yaml

This could be useful if, for example, you use another language (other than jsonnet) to render your JSON/YAML and want to see the outcomes in Grafana.

Reviewing changes to your Jsonnet scripts in Grafana

If you are working with Jsonnet, and your jsonnet codebase covers more than one file, you can specify the entrypoint for your Jsonnet and the directory to watch independently:

grr serve -w examples/grr.jsonnet examples

If your sources are in multiple directories, you can watch multiple sources, e.g:

grr serve -w examples/grr.jsonnet examples/*.*sonnet examples/vendor

Reviewing changes to code in other languages in Grafana

The Grafana Foundation SDK provides libraries in a range of languages that can be used to render Grafana dashboards. Watching changes to these with Grizzly is also possible.

git clone https://github.com/grafana/grafana-foundation-sdk
cd grafana-foundation-sdk/examples/typescript/red-method
npm install
grr serve -w -S 'npm run -s dev' .

Finally, open the Grizzly server at http://localhost:8080 and select the Red Method dashboard.

Now, any changes to any of the Typescript files for the example Red Method dashboard will be instantly shown in your dashboard.