Journey overview on Grafana Labs

Journey overview

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:12:13 +0200

What you’ll learn

If you’ve ever had an alert rule silently changed in production, or spent time recreating notification policies someone deleted by accident, this journey is for you. It’s built around two main sections that teach you to manage Grafana resources as code:

Section	Skills
Grafana resources as code	Understand the Grafana Terraform provider, define alert resources in HCL, and deploy them with Terraform
CI/CD automation	Automate deployment with GitHub Actions

What you’ll build

During this journey you’ll build a complete resources-as-code workflow:

Alert rules, contact points, and notification policies defined in HCL
Deployed to Grafana via Terraform
Automated through a GitHub Actions pipeline

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

Who this journey is for

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:12:13 +0200

You’re in the right place if you

Already manage infrastructure with Terraform and want to add Grafana resources to the same workflow
Are tired of manual resource 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, alert rules, and data sources are
Git + GitHub	Comfortable with branches, commits, PRs
Terraform	Comfortable with providers, resources, plan/apply
HCL	Can read and write basic Terraform configuration files

You don’t need any prior experience with the Grafana Terraform provider. This journey covers it from scratch.

Why Grafana as code

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:12:13 +0200

The problem with manual processes

Your team has dozens of alert rules 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 configuration drift: live resources silently diverging from their intended state. Manual resource 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 resource in the UI with no review, so the live version diverges from what you intended
Duplication	Teams recreate similar resources 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 resources in any environment from the same code.

The Infrastructure as Code tools landscape

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Grafana’s as-code tools

Grafana offers several as-code tools. Each solves a different part of the problem, and they can work together. 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?
Terraform provider	Manages dashboards, folders, data sources, alert rules, contact points, notification policies, and more with Terraform	Teams already using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code	Yes
Git Sync	Syncs resource files 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
Foundation SDK	Defines dashboards in typed code (Go, TS, Python, Java, PHP)	Generating dashboard JSON programmatically	No (dashboard-specific)

Prerequisites

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:12:13 +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 (version 1.0 or later)

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 Infrastructure as Code tools landscape

Grafana’s as-code tools

Prerequisites

Required

Recommended