LedgerLine/docs/roadmap/phase-6.md

# Phase 6 — Dashboards and alerts as code

*Part of `docs/roadmap/` — see [`intro.md`](intro.md) for platform/background context and [`summary.md`](summary.md) for how every phase fits together. Prev: [`phase-5.md`](phase-5.md) · Next: [`phase-7.md`](phase-7.md)*

**Status:** Not started

**Message:** Depends on Phases 3–5 producing traces, logs and metrics worth
dashboarding.

**Time-box:** 2 evenings. This is an explicit requirement from Babak: *destroy and
recreate in seconds.*

### Concepts

- Three levels of "as code", and you should know when each applies:
  1. **File provisioning** — YAML in `provisioning/datasources/` and
     `provisioning/dashboards/`, plus dashboard JSON files mounted into the
     container. Grafana loads them at startup. Simplest, no state, no API tokens,
     perfect for a Compose demo. **This alone satisfies the requirement.**
  2. **Grafana Foundation SDK** — typed libraries (Go, **Python**, TypeScript, Java,
     PHP) that *generate* the dashboard JSON programmatically. Now a dashboard is a
     function: `red_dashboard("ledger")`, called seven times in a loop. Reviewable
     diffs, reusable panels, no 2000-line JSON blobs. Grafana now points here instead
     of Grafonnet (which is legacy and unofficial).
  3. **Terraform provider / Grafana Operator / Git Sync** — for state-managed,
     multi-environment, or GitOps setups. Overkill here; the right answer *later*,
     when this lands on your Kubernetes cluster.
- **Dashboards should answer questions, not display data.** A good service dashboard
  answers, in order: is it up, is it serving, is it erroring, is it slow, and where
  is the pressure. Panels that nobody looks at during an incident are cost, not value.
- **Alerts as code too.** Grafana alert rules, contact points and notification
  policies all provision from YAML. And keep the *alert definition* next to the
  dashboard that explains it.

### Resources

- Grafana docs → *Observability as code* (the index page — it lays out Foundation
  SDK, file provisioning, Git Sync and Terraform, and tells you which to use when).
- Grafana Foundation SDK repo → the Python examples, especially the `red-method`
  example.
- Udemy backbone: dashboard design sections (panel types, transformations,
  variables, dashboard best practice).

### Build

Your platform provisions **datasources only** — there is no dashboards provider at
all. So this phase is entirely yours, and the right home for it is inside the
platform's own manifests (`k8s/grafana/`, the k3s port of the Ansible role),
using the same mechanism as everything else.

1. **Extend `k8s/grafana/`.** Add a file-based dashboard provider (a
   `provisioning/dashboards/` YAML pointing at a mounted directory) and the
   dashboard JSON. Ship both through `configMapGenerator`, exactly as
   `datasources.yml` is shipped today, and mount them in `deployment.yaml`.
   Two k8s-specific things to work out:
   - A ConfigMap is capped at about 1 MiB, and client-side `kubectl apply`
     also stores a copy in an annotation. Large generated dashboards push
     against that.
   - The configMap hash suffix rolls the Grafana pod on every change.
     Decide whether that's what you want.
2. **Generate the JSON from code**, don't hand-write it. Use the **Grafana
   Foundation SDK (Python)**: one function producing a RED dashboard for a given
   service name, looped over the seven services; a second producing a system
   overview (service graph, stream lag, pool saturation, error-budget burn). Commit
   the generator *and* its output; `k8s/grafana/` ships the output.
3. **The demo is now `kubectl apply -k k8s/`.** Delete every dashboard through
   the Grafana UI, re-apply (or go further: `kubectl delete -k k8s/` and rebuild
   the whole platform), and watch them all come back.
   That is a strictly stronger answer to Babak's "destroy and recreate in seconds"
   than a local Makefile target, because it's the same command that builds the
   platform.
4. While you're in there, review the provisioned datasources and add what's missing:
   `tracesToMetrics` on Tempo (pointing at the Tempo-generated span metrics) is a
   worthwhile addition, and the existing `tracesToLogsV2` has no `tags` mapping —
   understand why `filterByTraceID: true` alone is sufficient here, and when it
   wouldn't be.
5. Add alert rules — see Phase 8 for the Alertmanager-vs-Grafana-alerting choice.

**Done when:** `kubectl apply -k k8s/` restores every dashboard from scratch, and no
dashboard has ever been saved through the Grafana UI.