New dashboards schema

Grafana’s dashboard schema has stayed mostly the same for years, originally built around a single grid layout. Over time, it became more complex and harder to work with, mixing different concerns and adding unnecessary complications. In Grafana v12, we’re introducing a new dashboard schema.

With this new architecture based on Scenes, we’re simplifying the schema to make it easier to understand and support powerful new features, like dynamic dashboards, tabs, and canvas-style layouts. The new schema also aims to simplify dashboard management, supporting the as-code approach of Git provisioning.

In the UI, the new schema is automatically enabled with the dynamic dashboards feature toggle, dashboardNewLayouts, and also requires the new dashboards API feature toggle, kubernetesDashboards, to be enabled.

What does this mean for new dashboards?

With the new schema enabled, you can build dynamic dashboards that support tabs, conditional logic, flexible panel layouts, and much more.

What does this mean for my old dashboards?

You can still open and view your pre-existing dashboards. Upon saving, they’ll be updated to the new schema, where you can take advantage of the new features and functionalities.

What if I disable the dynamic dashboards feature toggle?

Depending on how the dashboard was built, it will behave differently: 

• Dashboards built on the new schema through the UI - View only
• Dashboards built on Schema v1 - View and edit
• Dashboards built on the new schema with Terraform or the CLI - View and edit 

What if I disable both the dynamic dashboards and dashboards API feature toggles?

You’ll be unable to view or edit dashboards created or updated in the new schema.

Import/export

From the UI, dashboards created on the new schema can be exported and imported as other dashboards. When you export them to use in another instance, references of data sources are not persisted, but data source types are. You’ll have the option to select the data source of your choice in the import UI.