Workflows

Grizzly supports a number of workflows.

Static Resources

All examples so far have described Grizzly interacting with resources represented as static resources in YAML. This is the simplest use-case for Grizzly, but there are more powerful workflows available.

Pull/Push

With grr pull -d and grr apply -d it is possible to migrate dashboards between Grafana instances. To pull dashboards and folders from one instance to another is as simple as:

$ grr config create-context source
$ grr config set grafana.url <...source Grafana URL...>
$ grr config set grafana.token <...source Grafana service account token...>
$ grr config set targets Dashboard,Dashboardfolder
$ grr config set output-format json
$ grr pull resources

This asks Grizzly to pull all resources matching the <kind>/<UID> pattern for dashboards and folders into a directory called resources.

Note: Grizzly can pull datasources, but secure passwords won’t be included when pulled - these will need to be provided manually (either by editing into the downloaded YAML or pasting them in via the Grafana UI).

To push them to a new Grafana instance:

$ grr config create-context destination
$ grr config set grafana.url <...destination Grafana URL...>
$ grr config set grafana.token <...destination Grafana service account token...>
$ grr config set targets Dashboard,Dashboardfolder
$ grr config set output-format json
$ grr push resources

Jsonnet

The most powerful workflow for Grizzly involves Jsonnet, a powerful programming language that can be used to render JSON or YAML.

With this workflow, resources are described in Jsonnet. When Grizzly is invoked, it evaluates the Jsonnet and renders the resources into JSON/YAML. This it can then push to the relevant systems.

For more information see the Jsonnet page.

Full Command List

grr get

Retrieves a resource from the remote system, via its UID. Its UID will be two parts separated by a dot, <resource-type>.<resource-id>. A dashboard might be dashboard.mydash:

$ grr get Dashboard.my-uid

grr list

List all resources found after executing Jsonnet file.

$ grr list my-dir

You can change the format of your list output with -f, choices are default, wide, yaml and json:

$ grr list -f yaml my-dir

You can also list remote resources, using -r:

$ grr list -r

This will show remote resources for all configured providers.

grr show

Shows the resources found after executing Jsonnet, rendered as expected for each resource type:

$ grr show my-dir

grr diff

Compares each resource rendered by Jsonnet with the equivalent on the remote system:

$ grr diff my-lib.libsonnet

grr apply

Uploads each dashboard rendered by the mixin to Grafana

$ grr apply my-lib.libsonnet

grr push

“Push” is an alias for apply, above.

grr watch

Watches a directory for changes. When changes are identified, the jsonnet is executed and changes are pushed to remote systems. The directory is watched recursively (i.e. all subdirectories are watched too), but if new subdirectories are added, watch command needs to be re-started, as new directories will not be picked up automatically.

This example watches the current directory for changes, then executes and applies my-lib.libsonnet when changes are noticed:

$ grr watch . my-lib.libsonnet

grr export

Renders Jsonnet and saves resources as files directory which is specified with the second argument.

These resources can then be deployed This can be used with Grafana Provisioning to provision dashboards that can be picked up immediately by Grafana.

$ grr export some-mixin.libsonnet my-provisioning-dir

grr snapshot

When a backend supports snapshot functionality, this deploys resources as snapshots.

At present, only Grafana dashboards are supported, and will print out links for each snapshot that was uploaded.

$ grr preview my-lib.libsonnet

Grafana snapshots by default do not expire. Expiration can be set via the -e, --expires flag which takes a number of seconds as an argument.

Flags

-t, --target strings

It allows the targeting of resources by key, where key is in the form <type>.<uid>.

Targets can also be wildcards, e.g. Dashboard.*. If no . character is provided, then the target will be matched against the resource type only (e.g. Dashboard). In such a case, lower case names are allowed.

Run grr list to get a list of resource keys in your code.

-J, --jpath

It allows the targeting folder containing jsonnet library to include, should be repeated multiple times.

If not specified it include vendor, lib and local dir (.) folders by default.