Provisioning fundamentals - Provisioning changes don't appear on launch

Grafana
,
1

I want to define the following things ahead of time, so I can just upload my provision files onto a new system and have it set up:

  • Create Teams / define Permissions
  • Create Dashboards in a Folder
  • Define Panels on those Dashboards
  • Define Alert Contact Point
  • Define Alerts on Dashboards
  • Define Data Sources

I am trying to accomplish this with provisioning, but having great difficulty. On a Linux system (currently Redhat, but that may change) I am attempting to use provisioning, but when I make changes in grafana/provisioning. I do not see any of the expected changes when I launch Grafana and view it at localhost:3000.

I download Grafana from docker (docker pull grafana/grafana). There are two directories that contain grafana/provisioning, and I’m not sure which is correct but I’ve tried both.
./.local/share/containers/storage/overlay/6a7cb7a452b8ea4bb8afca328aa190b6c4ac4f6b891e8ad4f45c0b1961c3608a/diff/usr/share/grafana/conf/provisioning and ./.local/share/containers/storage/overlay/2e57c23fa705eda6690fbedc996a312dae133202f7fa8f70ad25f24d0e34eb4e/diff/etc/grafana/provisioning. I have tried making a default.yaml file in provisioning, or going into each subdirectory (ex: dashboards) and modifying the sample.yaml files.

sample.yaml
sample.yaml740×1033 43.7 KB

I follow instructions here (Start the Grafana server | Grafana documentation) and start Grafana with sudo systemctl daemon-reload, sudo systemctl start grafana-server.

Another approach, I follow the instructions here (Run Grafana Docker image | Grafana documentation) to setup Docker volumes.
I download docker compose, and create a docker compose file. I launch with docker compose up -d and stop the container with docker compose down.

Sometimes this launches successfully, sometimes I hit various launch errors, but I never see the changes I expected to see from my provisioned files. I don’t see the teams T1/T2. I don’t see the folder ABCD or the Dashboards D1/D2.

If I’m making any fundamental errors, provisioning is a bad method to achieve what I described, or if anything I listed above is not able to be provisioned, please let me know. Thank you!

2

Who/what told you that you can provision teams, please? (let me guess - some LLM)

I would recommend starting with the official doc for your Grafana version, for example, Provision Grafana | Grafana documentation

3

Who/what told you that you can provision teams, please?

This website (Provisioning RBAC with Grafana | Grafana documentation) mentioned you can assign roles to Teams in provisioning files, so I may have wrongly inferred that they can also create them.

If you’re implying that Teams cannot be created by a provision file, I’d appreciate if it you could say so directly. I’ve read many of the Technical documentation | Grafana Labs pages but I’m still trying to learn what provisioning can and can’t do.

Some of the things I listed should be possible with provisioning and some might not. I’d like advice on why none of the changes I make seem to show when I launch the Grafana server- am I writing the files in the wrong place, are the files flawed, etc.?

If there’s a better way to approach what I’m trying to accomplish please let me know. Thank you.

4

Ok, do you have Grafana enterprise (= “paid” version) as it is mentioned in the doc?

5

I install with docker pull grafana/grafana. That installs Grafana Enterprise, but I currently don’t pay for Enterprise so I shouldn’t have access to any features locked behind Enterprise. I believe provisioning is equally available at the Enterprise and Cloud level, but if you know otherwise I’m open to being corrected.