Dashboards as Code
Sanooj Mananghat
@sanoojm
Understanding the state of your infrastructure and systems is essential for ensuring the reliability and stability of services. Best way to gain this insight is with a robust dashboard that visualizes data and stable alert rules which alerts when things appear to be broken.
Configuring and modifying dashboards and alerts by hand are error-prone. Versioning dashboards and alerts using “Infrastructure as code” are extremely useful in a fast-paced environment.
Outline
How to make use of the world’s top technology to build your Dashboards with more robustness without tech debt.
Why dashboards?
Existing methods of maintaining dashboards.
- At current scale of using dashbaords and alerts, difficult to scale without proper automation.
- Consistency issues
- Dashboards can be easily edited by any layman resulting in consistency issues.
- Alerts disbaled during maintenance/deployment leading to undetected incidents.
- Automate challenges
- 90% of the dashboards are still being created/modified by clicking on the UI.
- Manual configuration can lead to errors.
- No history.
- No rollbacks possible during an unintended modification.
Solution 1: Git
- Will solve Consistency issues and maintains history.
- It still cannot validate the huge json files, manual review is required.
- Automation of stored json files to dashboards are still not solved.
Solution 2: Git + Terraform
- Terraform providers/plugins. - Automating dashboards using terrafrom providers.
- Manage state, conflicts, support validation, rollback, everything with zero tech debt.
- Add value to your skills.
Demo of how to create a dashboard with Terraform and Grafana
Speaker bio
Sanooj Mananghat is working as a DataSRE @ Intuit. With 9 years of experience in Devops world. A blogger, opensource enthusiast with contributions to multiple opensource projects including terraform providers.
Links
- https://medium.com/@sanoojm/wavefront-terraform-integration-396139e5d364
- https://medium.com/@sanoojm
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