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What is Grizzly?

Grafana Grizzly is a command line tool that allows you to manage your observability resources with code.

Now you can define your dashboards, alerting and recording rules, etc, all from within your codebase.

You can build Grizzly into your continuous deployment pipelines, meaning whenever you deploy your application, your observability is updated too.

Getting Started

The simplest way to achieve this is using YAML resource descriptions. (Programmatic description is explained in the section on Jsonnet).

We will first explore how to use Grizzly with Grafana.

Authentication

To work with Grafana, you will need to give Grafana credentials for your instance. The recommended way to do this would be to create a “context”, and set the Grafana URL and a service account token. Here we create an “instance” context:

grr config create-context instance
grr config set grafana.url http://localhost:3000
grr config set grafana.token <my-service-account-token>

For further explanations and other options, see authentication.

Managing a Simple Dashboard

Below is an example YAML representation of a Grafana dashboard (the format is inspired by Kubernetes):

dashboard.yaml:

apiVersion: grizzly.grafana.com/v1alpha1
kind: Dashboard
metadata:
    name: prod-overview
    folder: general
spec:
    schemaVersion: 17
    tags:
        - templated
    timezone: browser
    title: Production Overview
    uid: prod-overview

This has a number of components:

  • kind: the type of object being described
  • apiVersion: the specific version of that type of object
  • metadata: various descriptors for the resource
  • spec: the actual resource that will be pushed to the end point.

Once authentication has been configured, this very basic dashboard can be uploaded to Grafana with this command:

$ grr apply dashboard.yaml
Dashboard/prod-overview added

Let’s change the schemaVersion field in dashboard.yaml to 18. Then we can see what has changed, that is, what changes will be applied to Grafana on the next apply:

$ grr diff dashboard.yaml
--- Remote
+++ Local
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
     folder: general
     name: prod-overview
 spec:
-    schemaVersion: 17
+    schemaVersion: 18
     tags:
         - templated
     timezone: browser

After this, we can apply this simple change:

$ grr apply dashboard.yaml
Dashboard/prod-overview updated