Giving panels meaningful IDs -- can this be done?

Grafana Dashboards
1
  • What Grafana version and what operating system are you using?
grafana-server --version
Version 12.0.1 (commit: 80658a73c5355e3ed318e5e021c0866285153b57, branch: HEAD)

The server is running on Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS on x86_64.

Client-side, I’m using Chrome Version 137.0.7151.68 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS on x86_64.

  • What are you trying to achieve?

I want to have fairly meaningful URLs for my panels.

So, instead of

https://grafana.example.com/d/application-stats?viewPanel=panel-363

I might have

https://grafana.example.com/d/application-stats?viewPanel=panel-process-counts

  • How are you trying to achieve it?

I went into a dashboard’s json model, found the panel in question, found its id, changed its id from 363 to "process-counts"

  • What happened?

It almost worked! A given panel’s URL now is a lot more meaningful.

But editing that panel stopped working. If you clicked on a panel’s 3 dots and then Edit, it’d take you to https://grafana.example.com/d/application-stats/application-stats?blahblah=blah&editPanel=NaN

  • What did you expect to happen?

I hoped nothing would break. Trying to edit should have taken you to https://grafana.example.com/d/application-stats/application-stats?blahblah=blah&editPanel=process-counts

  • Can you copy/paste the configuration(s) that you are having problems with?

Difficult. I just tried to create a much smaller testcase (dashboard with a single empty panel) and when I edited the id in question, it got rewritten to null. This didn’t happen with my much larger dashboard.

  • Did you receive any errors in the Grafana UI or in related logs? If so, please tell us exactly what they were.

None in the UI. I don’t have convenient access to its logs just now.

  • Did you follow any online instructions? If so, what is the URL?

No, n/a

[Edit: s/panel/dashboard/ in one spot.]

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