Hello, Grafana community.
I want to be able to add a common set of panels to many dashboards. I think it should be called mixins, but the term is already used for dashboards generated from jsonnet. I don’t have a better one.
Why is in needed? Suppose, in a microservice environment there are 1000 microservices and they report a common set of metrics, that could be described with 50 panels. But each one also has a small set of custom metrics that could be represented with 2 more panels and 2 more variables. Adding manually 50 common panels is a lot of work. But more than that, fixing anything in a common set would mean updating 1000 dashboards.
So it would be great to be able to ‘mix in’ or ‘embed’ a dashboard or just a common set of panels. As far as I know, it is not currently possible.
What could be done instead?
- Linking to a single common dashboard - yes, possible, but you want see their data a the same time. It’s hard to correlate the data.
- Generating with jsonnet and existing mixins. It would work to generate 1000 dashboards with common panels, but how to add custom panels and variables there? And even if it’s possible, graphical editor functionality would be lost. Any changes would be needed to be made in the code.
- ‘Dashboard list’ panel - same as #1 and also the search field can’t expand variables.
There were a couple of related questions, but they didn’t help my use case:
https://community_grafana_com/t/sub-dashboards-in-grafana/20423