Journey overview on Grafana Labs

Journey overview

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:16:44 +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 course is for you. It’s built around three main sections that teach you to manage dashboards as code:

Section	Skills
SDK fundamentals	Define dashboards as typed code using builder blocks
Deploying dashboards	Deploy a dashboard JSON with Terraform
CI/CD automation	Automate deployment with GitHub Actions

What you’ll build

During this course you’ll build a complete dashboard-as-code workflow:

A dashboard defined in Go or TypeScript
Deployed to Grafana via Terraform
Automated through a GitHub Actions pipeline

By the end, every dashboard change goes through version control, code review, and automated deployment, just like your infrastructure.

Who this journey is for

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:16:44 +0200

You’re in the right place if you

Already manage infrastructure with Terraform and want to add dashboards to the same workflow
Are tired of manual dashboard management that doesn’t scale
Want version control, code review, and CI/CD for your observability stack

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, PRs
Terraform	Comfortable with providers, resources, plan/apply
Go or TypeScript	Can read code snippets in either language

You don’t need any prior experience with the Foundation SDK or the Grafana Terraform provider. This journey covers both from scratch.

Why Grafana as code

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:16:44 +0200

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
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

By using Grafana as code, you’ll gain:

Version control. Every change is a Git commit with context.
Code review. Pull requests catch mistakes before they reach production.
Automation. CI/CD ensures what’s in the repo is what’s deployed.
Reproducibility. Spin up identical dashboards in any environment from the same code.

The Observability as Code tools landscape

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:16:44 +0200

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 the generate-and-deploy workflow.

This journey doesn’t cover all the as Code tools available in Grafana, it only focuses on the Foundation SDK (generate) + Terraform (deploy) + GitHub Actions (automate) workflow.

Tool overview

This table has details on each tool, what it does, what to use it for, and whether it’s covered in this journey.

Tool	What it does	Use it for	Part of this journey?
Foundation SDK	Defines dashboards in typed code (Go, TS, Python, Java, PHP)	Generating dashboard JSON programmatically	Yes
Terraform provider	Manages dashboards, folders, data sources, and alerts with Terraform, alongside your infrastructure	Teams already using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code	Yes
Git Sync	Syncs dashboard JSON in a GitHub repo with Grafana	Teams wanting Git-native workflows without custom pipelines	No
gcx	Command-line tool that authenticates to Grafana and pushes or pulls resources from your local machine	Quick deployments, CI/CD steps, scripting	No

Prerequisites

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:16:44 +0200

Required

Grafana instance (version 12 or higher, Cloud or self-managed)
Service account token (an API credential that lets automated tools authenticate to Grafana without using your personal login)
GitHub repository (for the CI/CD section)
Terraform (for deployment modules)
Go 1.21+ or Node.js 18+ (for running SDK code)

Journey overview on Grafana Labs

Journey overview

What you’ll learn

What you’ll build

Who this journey is for

You’re in the right place if you

Assumed knowledge

Why Grafana as code

The problem with manual processes

How as code solves this

The Observability as Code tools landscape

Grafana’s Observability as Code tools

Tool overview

Prerequisites

Required

Recommended