Provision dashboards at runtime

[jonathan-lo]

Hi,
We're using this project through the prometheus-operator, and are finding the workflow of adding dashboards a little clunky.

I've noticed that in the official helm charts for grafana, there's an option for using a sidecar to provision dashboards by monitoring configmaps with a given label/namespace. Is this something that this project is interested in porting over?

[brancz]

Grafana v5 should auto provision dashboards as well when the underlying configmap is changed. If this doesn't work that would be a bug. What the chart uses was initially implemented by us at coreos within the kube-prometheus project, but we talked to the Grafana people and they integrated it directly into Grafana, so we removed our hack 🙂 .

[jonathan-lo]

Hi @brancz thanks for the response.
To clarify, our requirement is that we would like to add dashboards that are not included in the configuration when provisioning, and hence there's no config map that we can use to introduce the change.

Is your recommendation here to redeploy the whole grafana stack? We are using this project through prometheus operator so this a little heavy handed.

[brancz]

That's exactly what this entire stack was designed for. Why do you feel it's "heavy handed"? You just need to update the ConfigMap and Grafana will automatically reload it and provision the dashboards.