Journey overview on Grafana Labs

Journey overview

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:11:48 +0200

What you’ll learn

If you’ve ever lost track of who changed a dashboard, or spent an afternoon recreating panels someone deleted by accident, this journey is for you. You’ll manage dashboards the same way you manage application code: define them in a programming language, keep the files in Git, and keep Grafana aligned with that repository.

What you’ll build

A dashboard defined in Go or TypeScript with the Foundation SDK
JSON for that dashboard stored in a GitHub repository
Grafana kept in sync with that Git repository through Git Sync
A GitHub Actions pipeline that regenerates the JSON when code changes

By the end, every dashboard change can go through version control, and Grafana stays aligned with your dashboards stored in Git.

Who this journey is for

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:11:48 +0200

You’re in the right place if you

Already use Git to review workflows and want dashboards in that same process
Are tired of manual dashboard management that doesn’t scale
Want version control and pull requests for your observability stack without adopting Terraform (plan-and-apply infrastructure-as-code) for dashboard deploy

This journey deploys dashboards with Git Sync. If your team already standardizes on Terraform for Grafana resources, take the Terraform version of this journey instead.

Dashboards as Code with the Foundation SDK and Terraform

Assumed knowledge

You don’t need to be an expert, but you should be familiar with the following tools and concepts.

Skill	Level needed
Grafana	Know what dashboards, panels, and data sources are
Git + GitHub	Comfortable with branches, commits, and pull requests
Go or TypeScript	Can read code snippets in either language

You don’t need prior experience with the Foundation SDK or Git Sync. This journey covers both from scratch. Terraform is not required.

Why Grafana as code

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The problem with manual processes

Your team has 30 dashboards across staging and production. Someone tweaks a threshold in production on Friday afternoon, and by Monday no one remembers what changed or why. That’s dashboard drift: live dashboards silently diverging from their intended state. Manual dashboard management creates three recurring problems like this that grow worse as your team scales.

Problem	What happens
dashboard drift	Anyone with edit access can change a dashboard in the UI with no review, so the live version diverges from what you intended
Duplication	Teams copy dashboards instead of sharing one source; fixes don’t propagate
No audit trail	You can’t answer “who changed what, when, and why” at scale

How as code solves this

Managing dashboards as code means keeping dashboard definitions in version-controlled files instead of only in the UI. You gain:

Version control. Every change is a Git commit with context.
Code review. Pull requests catch mistakes before they reach production.
Automation. A CI/CD pipeline can regenerate files so what’s in the repo stays the source of truth.
Recovery. You can restore a known-good version from Git after a bad edit or accidental delete.

The Observability as Code tools landscape

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Grafana’s Observability as Code tools

Grafana offers several as-code tools. Each solves a different part of the problem, and they can work together. This diagram shows how they relate in a generate-and-sync workflow.

This journey focuses on the Foundation SDK (generate) + Git Sync (sync) + GitHub Actions (automate) workflow. While the SDK alone only creates dashboards as code but doesn’t update Grafana, Git Sync is what keeps Grafana aligned with the JSON in Git.

Tool overview

Tool	What it does	Use it for	Part of this journey?
Foundation SDK	Defines dashboards in typed code (Go, TypeScript, Python, Java, PHP)	Generating dashboard JSON programmatically	Yes
Git Sync	Syncs dashboard and folder JSON in a Git repo with Grafana	Git-native workflows where the repository is the source of truth	Yes
Terraform provider	Manages Grafana resources with Terraform plan and apply	Teams already using Terraform for infrastructure	No (covered in the Terraform journey)
gcx	Grafana CLI that pushes or pulls resources from your machine or a pipeline	Quick pushes, scripting, alternate CI deploy steps	No

Prerequisites

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Required

A Grafana instance (Grafana Cloud, OSS, or Enterprise) where you have Grafana Admin access, so you can open Administration > General > Provisioning later. You can sign up for free
A Git repository you can commit to. This journey focuses on GitHub, but Git Sync also works with any Git repository, such as GitLab or Bitbucket
Go or Node.js installed for the Foundation SDK language you choose
A GitHub personal access token when you reach Git Sync setup: a credential string that lets Grafana read and write the repository, or any other authentication method you may use

Terraform is not required for this journey.