dashboarding

Grafana Dashboard Authoring

Docs: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/dashboards/

Dashboards are JSON. Author once, push via API, share by uid.

Prerequisites

• Grafana stack (OSS, Enterprise, or Cloud) reachable from your machine
• API token with dashboards:write (Authorization: Bearer <token>)
• jq for inspecting responses
• The JSON-schema cheat sheet in references/json-schema.md

Common Workflows

1. Push a new dashboard via the API + verify

# 1. Build the payload — wrap the dashboard JSON, set folder, mark overwrite
cat > /tmp/dash.json <<'JSON'
{
  "dashboard": {
    "uid": "demo-svc-v1",
    "title": "Demo Service",
    "schemaVersion": 41,
    "tags": ["demo"],
    "time": { "from": "now-1h", "to": "now" },
    "templating": { "list": [] },
    "panels": [{
      "id": 1, "type": "timeseries", "title": "Request Rate",
      "gridPos": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 24, "h": 8 },
      "datasource": { "type": "prometheus", "uid": "prometheus" },
      "targets": [{
        "expr": "sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) by (status_code)",
        "legendFormat": "{{status_code}}", "refId": "A"
      }],
      "fieldConfig": { "defaults": { "unit": "reqps" }, "overrides": [] }
    }]
  },
  "folderUid": "",
  "overwrite": true,
  "message": "initial push"
}
JSON

# 2. Validate the JSON BEFORE you send it (catches trailing-comma typos)
jq empty /tmp/dash.json && echo "json ok"

# 3. POST
RESP=$(curl -s -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "$GRAFANA/api/dashboards/db" -d @/tmp/dash.json)
echo "$RESP" | jq '{status, uid, url, version}'
# Expect: status="success", url="/d/demo-svc-v1/...", version=1 (incremented on each push)

# 4. Verify the round-trip — read it back and confirm one panel + the expected title
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  "$GRAFANA/api/dashboards/uid/demo-svc-v1" \
  | jq '{title: .dashboard.title, panels: (.dashboard.panels | length)}'
# Expect: {"title":"Demo Service","panels":1}

# 5. Open the dashboard in a browser — confirm the panel renders with data.