Testing globalDashboardVariables

[stephenking]

Hi,

I know it wasn’t mentioned in the Grafana 13.2 release notes, but I noticed that there were new features added behind the globalDashboardVariables feature flag, which allows to define dashboard variables on global / folder scope. That’s nicely described in this PR.

Unfortunately, setting the toggle didn’t show me the menu item Dashboards > Variables.

Can anyone guide me to how it can be used already in the early stage? It’s for us a super helpful feature, as we want to evaluate Git Sync and avoid Terraform templating during dashboard provisioning..

Thanks
Steffen

[stephenking]

I noticed that a few weeks later, an OpenFeature-based toggle has been added:

pkg/services/featuremgmt/toggles_gen.csv

Just not sure how to specify those. I tried the following Helm chart values config, but this resulted in Settings UI showing map[dashboardGlobalVariables:true]:

  feature_toggles:
    grafana:
      dashboardGlobalVariables: true

[jangaraj]

I would try different syntax on the helm level:

  feature_toggles:
    "grafana.dashboardGlobalVariables": true

[stephenking]

thanks, that worked!

Now I’m just trying to make the feature work. So far I couldn’t access those variables in my dashboard. Anyone knows if that should already work?

[jangaraj]

Was Grafana restarted properly?
Do you work with V2 dashboards (dashboard schema v2)?

LLM advice:

Once enabled:

1. Dashboards → Variables nav item appears under the Dashboards section (for org-wide variable management at /dashboards/variables).
2. Global and folder-scoped variables defined via dashboard.grafana.app/v2beta1 are automatically injected into every V2 dashboard at load time.
3. A “Predefined variables” option appears in the dashboard sidebar to control which global/folder variables a dashboard inherits (None, All, or specific ones).

It is still experimental:

pkg/services/featuremgmt/registry.go

So I would say you (your AI agent) need to read source code to find how it works.

[stephenking]

Thanks for checking this. Indeed.. the last piece I did not expect.