dhall-grafana

Your Grafana dashboards-as-code with Dhall!

Usage

Install dhall-to-json by downloading it from dhall-haskell/releases. When you have the binary in your $PATH it's as easy as running:

$ dhall-to-json --file all_dashboard.dhall

Import the output to Grafana and you're done!

Make sure you have a TestData DB datasource configured to see the ./examples/all_dashboard.dhall graphs be populated.

Getting started

First confirm that your tooling works by walking through Usage. Open up a new file after you're done, and copy-paste in the following:

let Grafana =
        https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weeezes/dhall-grafana/master/package.dhall sha256:af6de80932dfaf74e46b72707b1264213afa28771c1e2bb53698c079b3e3ac2f
      ? https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weeezes/dhall-grafana/master/package.dhall

in {=}

Compile it by running dhall-to-json:

$ dhall-to-json --file tutorial.dhall
{}

We have an empty object, it's something! Let's add in a dashboard:

let Grafana =
        https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weeezes/dhall-grafana/master/package.dhall sha256:af6de80932dfaf74e46b72707b1264213afa28771c1e2bb53698c079b3e3ac2f
      ? https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weeezes/dhall-grafana/master/package.dhall

in Grafana.Dashboard::
	{ title = "Tutorial"
	}

Compile it and the output should be a bit more interesting. It's your first Grafana dashboard, built with Dhall!

Notice the :: after Grafana.Dashboard? That's called record completion. We're filling in our own values on top of a default, which you can examine in defaults/Dashboard.dhall. You can find all other default values and overrideable parameters from defaults/! To find an example of record completion, check out the Dhall Cheatsheet records section to understand how package.dhall works.

Let's add in our first panel:

let Grafana =
        https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weeezes/dhall-grafana/master/package.dhall sha256:af6de80932dfaf74e46b72707b1264213afa28771c1e2bb53698c079b3e3ac2f
      ? https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weeezes/dhall-grafana/master/package.dhall

in  Grafana.Dashboard::{
    , title = "test"
    , panels =
        Grafana.Utils.generateIds
          [ Grafana.Panels.mkGraphPanel
              Grafana.GraphPanel::{
              , title = "test"
              , gridPos = { x = 0, y = 0, w = 12, h = 6 }
              }
          ]
    }

Whoo, that looks a lot more exciting! There's a few things going on here. We're adding the panels by passing them in to the Dashboards panels field. The panels have to have unique IDs, so we can use the generateIds utility and the mkGraphPanel helper to get exactly that. mkGraphPanel eats a GraphPanel, also defined with record completion. The end result is a list of Panels, and Dashboard happily accepts that type.

Compile it, import it to Grafana, and let your eyes rest on that masterpiece!

Local development

There is a local development setup that works on Linux that you can read more of here