Built-in Dashboard edits

[waxen prism]

Hello, I'm interested in updating some of the labels used in a few dashboards in our harvest instance, for example, to include a cluster name in the legend fields of the volume dashboard.

I find this useful because we may have identically named volumes serving the same purpose in different clusters/sites, and if I configure a volume dashboard to focus on that volume name across all clusters, I end up with a bunch of graphs without enough context to help interpret them, because each line has the exact same legend text.

So my main question was, will my dashboard edits be wiped out on the next harvest update?

Additionally, is there any recommended way to implement those kinds of dashboard customizations in a way that wouldn't get blown away? If the answer is, just build some automation/script to update the dashboards when you upgrade harvest, I'm OK with that. But figured I'd inquire before spending time on that.

[turbid nest]

This is NAbox I suppose ?

[thick wagon]

hi @waxen prism that makes sense. How are you installing Harvest? I wonder if that would be generally useful to everyone? The only real downside to including {{cluster}} in all the volume panels is the panels would take more horizontal space and make require horizontal scrolling. Hmm, what do folks think? Should we add a cluster label to all panels for all dashboards?

Now to your question about edits - it's tricky. On the one hand, Grafana saves all edits as versions so you never really lose your edits even if you completely overwrite the dashboard. On the other hand, your edits make it more difficult for you to adopt the latest changes from Harvest. You would need to diff your version with ours and apply the changes.

Alternatively, as you mentioned, you could create a script/program to apply your changes to the latest version of the dashboards. That's one of the nice things about the dashboard's being json. The bin/harvest grafana import or bin/grafana customize commands include some CLI options to help rewrite dashboards that you could use for inspiration. We don't currently have one that does what you want in this case

[waxen prism]

correct, this is with NAbox

[turbid nest]

Personally I would recommend saving as. Since recently you can actually edit dashboards and save in place but I didn’t do much testing as what the behavior is when harvest updates the dashboards. @thick wagon ?

[thick wagon]

SaveAs works and means you do not have to restore from Versions but it has the same issue I described above if you also want to adopt the latest changes from Harvest.

[waxen prism]

ah so "save as" = a new copy with the modifications.

[thick wagon]

yes

Please open a feature request if you want us to add cluster labels to all dashboard panels

[waxen prism]

will do, thank you

[thick wagon]

you're welcome!

[waxen prism]

one last question - would you expect that my modifications in the current Harvest would be blown away at the next harvest update?

[thick wagon]

They will be overwritten when you upgrade Harvest in Nabox, but they are still available in the Versions tab of the screenshot I pasted above