User experience when creating/editing dashboards

[dudicoco]

Hi,

The project's roadmap mentions the following problem:

A tool to review Grafana dashboard changes on PRs. While reviewing jsonnet code is a lot easier than the large Grafana json sources, it's hard to imagine what that will actually end up looking like once rendered. Ideally a production-like environment is spun up and produces metrics to be graphed, then a tool could take a screenshot and Grafana snapshot of the rendered Grafana dashboards. That way the changes can not only be reviewed in code but also visually. Similar to point 2 this should eventually be it's own project.

However, I believe the issue is deeper than that.
There are a few tools this days which attempt to generate grafana dashboards json files, for example:

1. https://github.com/grafana/grafonnet-lib
2. https://github.com/jakubplichta/grafana-dashboard-builder
3. https://github.com/deliveryhero/grafyaml

In the end, I don't believe any tool can really provide an easy straight forward experience for the user when creating dashboards as they can be very complex.
Even if the final dashboard snapshot is generated within a PR, the user still needs to understand how to build this dashboard entirely via code.

How can we overcome this issue, considering that the goal of this project is to make Grafana stateless?
Perhaps a sandbox environment is needed here where the user can actually build the dashboard and then export the json in the end?