Fixing Grafana's IaC Problem
The conflict arises when teams use IaC tools to deploy Grafana dashboards. This results in dashboards that can be edited in the UI, but changes cannot be saved - a frustrating user experience.
Imagine a typical Grafana user: they pull up a shared dashboard, make some improvements, then hit Save dashboard. Later, high-fives abound as the team celebrates this contribution.
Inspired, our typical user finds another dashboard and invests serious time improving it. However, just as they click Save dashboard a frustrating surprise rears its head:
What did our noble dashboard editor do wrong? Nothing! Thanks to Grafana's intuitive UI, they had no trouble making some awesome improvements, and every reason to believe the Save dashboard button would work just like it did last time.
The whole premise of DevOps is breaking down organizational silos. We desperately want to empower developers, product managers, and even management roles with control over their alerts and dashboards. The best way to do this is through the UI they already use to operate their applications (such as Grafana).
