0018. Dashboard with a shareable copy

• Status: accepted
• Date: 2026-10-21

Context

The dashboard has to work in two ways. Provisioned from files on the operator’s own Grafana, it should let them pick the data source and the game servers. Imported somewhere else, for example from a dashboard catalogue later, it must not carry anything of the place it came from: no data source uid, no selected server name, no host address (ADR 0013). A dashboard with variables keeps the values it was saved with, and a stored data source uid breaks the import on every other Grafana. The rows the plan asks for are tick time, players, the game server’s resources, host, MariaDB and tunnel; the resource list of the game server is not collected (ADR 0009, one series per resource would break the cardinality budget).

Considered options

1. One dashboard with a data source variable and a server variable, plus a copy without variables that a script makes from it and the dashboard check compares on every pull request.
2. One dashboard with variables only, shared with Grafana’s own export.
3. Two dashboards edited by hand.

Decision

Chosen option 1, because the copy then never drifts from the dashboard and needs no Grafana to be made. grafana/dashboards/game-server-overview.json has the variable datasource (no stored selection, so Grafana picks the viewer’s default Prometheus data source) and server (several servers, stored as All). python3 scripts/lint_dashboards.py --fix writes grafana/dashboards/shareable/game-server-overview.json from it: every panel names the import input ${DS_PROMETHEUS}, the matchers on $server are dropped so that the copy shows every server, and it gets its own uid (-shared), so that importing it next to the provisioned one never replaces it. Option 2 keeps the variables and their stored values in the export, and its result depends on the Grafana that exports it. Option 3 would drift. The dashboard has no resources row; its host row shows the machine’s CPU, memory, disk and network instead. The optional data source file names its data source “Game server metrics” (uid gso-prometheus), not “Prometheus” and not the default, so that it never replaces or takes over a data source the operator already has.

Consequences

• Good: on 2026-10-21 Grafana 13.2.4 provisioned the dashboard from these files alone, and every query of both files returned data from the fake server and the exporters; the copy imported with one data source input and no variable left.
• Bad: the copy cannot filter one game server. A variable may only be used as a label matcher of the form label=~"$server"; the generator refuses anything else. After every change of the dashboard the copy has to be written again (the check fails until it is).