You might have heard about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to define your infrastructure. It enables GitOps which helps in improving code deployment velocity and testing of Infrastructure. It is also scalable and makes rolling back infrastructure changes easier upon failures. Dashboard as code is a similar concept.
With Grafana, one can not only define dashboards but also alerts. When one visits a dashboard, it is expected that the dashboard gives a complete picture of how a particular system in your cloud infrastructure is functioning. Grafana Labs talks in detail on how to create such dashboards. Grafana provides a way to define these dashboards and alerts. However, they come with their own disadvantages.
- No human could possibliy create them by hand and maintain them. Scalability is an issue. Read more about Grafana JSON model
- Cannot apply CI CD practices
- Code re-usability is non-existent
- Cannot apply changes across all dashboards and alerts
- Automated dashboard and alert provisioning and de-provisioning using IaC.
- Given the serverless trend today, your cloud infrastructure can have various functions that are triggered by ways. In such cases, it is difficult to create individual dashboards and maintain them. They get renamed, moved and deleted
This project (very much a WIP) generates dynamic Grafana canned dashboards and alerts for various services that are running on AWS. This project uses Cloudwatch metrics and logs to display dashboards and create alerts. This project also contains companion Terraform modules in the terraform_modules folder to integrate with your Terraform code. This project makes use of Grafanalib to generate dashboards and alerts.
The project uses Grafanalib project to generate dynamic dashboards. So, it is expected that python3 and pip3 are available in the runtime environment. If you want to Terraform your dashboards, further requirements include Terraform.
The dashboards and alerts are generated in python3. So you would require python3 and pip3. Furthermore, if you need to develop companion terraform modules, you would require golang:1.14. It is however recommended that you use Docker and the make develop target to start developing dashboards and terraform modules.
Useful make targets:
make buildbuilds the docker images for local developmentmake test-dockerruns tests for the previously build docker imagesmake lintchecks currently the code formattingmake fixformats your terraform, go and python codemake testruns unit and integration testsmake generate-docsgenerates the terraform docs
The examples directory showcases various possibilies on using the terraform modules. They are also used as part of the integration tests in this project. Some example dashboards can be found above.