Provisioned dashboard updates between major versions

Grafana Dashboards
1

Hello,

I am in the process of updating our Grafana from 10.1.5 to 11.6.1. We have 50+ dashboards that are file provisioned.

I am doing small updates to some of the dashboards, and when I go to save them, I see many small changes being automatically done.

For example, here is a screenshot of the diff:

image
image800×1182 78.8 KB

This dashboard has two relatively simple Time Series visualizations. Other dashboards have dozens of Time Series and Tables visualizations. If I save those, I get 100’s of small changes like seen in the screenshot. None of them seem “breaking”, but I am thinking ahead to a future updates.

Reading ‘Breaking Changes’ in the What’s New sections, I don’t anticipate changes, but I am curious about the community’s thoughts or opinions about Provisioned dashboard maintenance between releases. Any input? Ty.

2

Those small changes are updates of the dashboard schema. For example in your case you are upgrading from 38 to 41 - new panel properties were added (e.g. hideZeroes), some have been removed (e.g. liveNow), ….

So maintenance in your case can be: provision all dashboards, load all dashboards in the browser (update if you need some new features), so the dashboard schema is upgraded. Save upgraded dashboard into provisioning files - so next provisioning will have the upgraded dashboards ready.

3

Ok thanks.

I think I will put off doing any of this until we evaluate moving to 12.x where it reads like there are a lot of other changes to dashboard schema. Still undecided about the new git sync features too instead of file provisioning via Helm/k8s.