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Our partners are very happy Grafana users. But I've observed some pain when they construct dashboards and alerts for each new device added. They are going to add thousands so this is very labour intensive! Some kind of "smart clone" would be very useful. (Thousands of dashboards feels like an anti-pattern, but alerts attached to thousands of sources is not)

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Definitely! I'd recommend using variables so you don't have to replicate the dashboards, but they don't work with alerts (yet). You could also use something like grafonnet or grafana-lib to generate dashboards with code.

Lots of options - Watch this space!

Have you thought about adding dashboard generation to your build automation? This is something we've implemented with Ansible. When a new service is built, it generates a dashboard and pushes it to Grafana via the API.

Similarly, if the service is updated, it also generates a dashboard and updates the previous one (this is easy because the update is an UPSERT). You can do interesting things like modularize pieces of the dashboard and update those modules independently. They can then get pulled into the Jinja template during the update.

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