Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use GDG to backup grafana?#

yes and no. GDG is not a full backup solution. If you are migrating from one server to another, doing disaster recovery gdg is not the right tool for the job. Grafana already has some really nice guides for how to do that.

GDG is used to backup and recreate specific entities. Usually it is used to allow for a consistent way to move say a dashboard, connections, alerts etc from one installation of grafana to the next.

The typical use case can be to manage release cycles. Example:

Create dashboard on dev, test everything out, pull into on a feature branch, deploy to staging environment. Validate everything looks good and promote it to production.

Why does GDG not list all my dashboards?#

By default, GDG works on a select list of watched or monitored folders. If none are specified, it will limit itself to only operating on General.

The folders that it DOES monitor, it is assumed that gdg has full control over. Meaning, anything in those folders is under its pervue, so it may delete all connections and replace them with the ones in its exports. As far as it knows, nobody else should be writing to it. The upload operation implies that you want to sync the export data with the data found in the backup local, cloud, or otherwise.

PS. if you want to list/import etc all dashboards, you can set the following config for your context.

    dashboard_settings:
      ignore_filters: true # When set to true all Watched filtered folders will be ignored and ALL folders will be acted on

My auth is not working anymore?#

Starting with v0.9.0, login credentials are no longer supported in the config. All secrets live in the “secure” folder relative to your export path. You may also configure a secure_path location by setting secure_location to the location of your secrets.

I need feature X, can you please add that in?#

Maybe? If there’s enough cycles, it could benefit others, and the feature makes sense I’d be happy to. It is also an OSS project, so contributions are always appreciated and welcome. See contributing for more info.

I need help, where do I go?#

There is a “Discussion” area on github where you can start a conversation and ask questions. If you think this is a bug in GDG itself, then please file an issue here. There is a small slack on channel titled #gdg in the grafana slack, you’re free to join here

I don’t like GDG because of: A, B, C… what else can I use#

• Grafanactl Recently Grafana released an official tool to manage resources.
• Grizzly Prior version of GrafanaCTL

Know of any others? Create a PR and add it to the list

I can’t upgrade my gdg version using homebrew, how do I fix this?#

if you’re getting an error about formula being disabled be sure to remove it first.

brew uninstall gdg
brew install --cask gdg

Then simply follow the install instructions.