Grafana Dashboards

This folder contains Istio's official Grafana dashboards. These get published to Grafana during release, and are bundled into our Grafana sample.

Jsonnet

Newer dashboards are generated with Jsonnet with the Grafonnet. More info on development workflow of these dashboards can be found here. This is the preferred method for any new dashboards.

Dashboard Linking

All dashboards must use UID-based linking rather than path-based linking. This is because:

1. Path-based linking is deprecated in newer Grafana versions
2. UID-based linking is more stable across Grafana upgrades
3. UID-based linking works with both self-hosted and Grafana Cloud instances

We use the MD5 hash of the dashboard filename as the UID, for example:

g.dashboard.withUid(std.md5('istio-mesh.json'))

For linking between dashboards, use the helper libraries:

• istio-service.libsonnet - For linking to the Service dashboard
• istio-workload.libsonnet - For linking to the Workload dashboard

Example of using dashboard links:

local serviceDashboard = import 'istio-service.libsonnet';

dashboard.new('My Dashboard')
+ g.dashboard.withLinks([
  serviceDashboard.dashboardLink
])

Legacy Dashboards

Many of our older dashboards are manually created in the UI and exported as JSON and checked in.

Generation

For both dashboard type, run ./manifests/addons/gen.sh to generate all required output.

After generation, you can verify that all dashboards are using UID-based linking by running:

./manifests/addons/dashboards/test_dashboard_links.sh