Contributing and communication

[Kristian Lyngstøl]

Greetings,

as I outlined in the community post [1], we at Telenor are in the process of establishing an extensive Grafana deployment, and we are facing some technical needs that will require coding.

Some of these changes will be trivial, some, perhaps not.

For trivial changes, I figure regular pull requests work fine. Also, when we have something to actually merge and/or review, pull requests for larger changes will also be perfectly fine.

Our challenge is what to do to get to the bigger changes.

So far, the community post got some, but little feedback. The PR Jostein made for some other changes got rejected due to other pending changes (which is fine). The Slack channels are mostly tumbleweed blowing by. This mailing list also seems fairly quiet.

This makes it difficult to contribute beyond simple bug-fixes and such, which I hope is in everyone's interest to address.

I have some suggestions on this matter, as I have a background from a couple of different FOSS projects (Mainly Varnish Cache and Compiz/Beryl), and I understand that this isn't a trivial task.

In Varnish Software, the company behind Varnish Cache, most technical discussions was split between in-house face to face discussions, and public IRC/mailing lists. On top of that, we did a weekly "bug wash" every monday, on IRC, where we spent half an hour to an hour just going over on-going/recent issues.

I'm not suggesting this is the right thing for Grafana, but it's an example of something that I have seen work, and which made the Varnish community open to non-Varnish Software employees.

I think we can do great things together - Grafana is a great product - so let's see if we can't figure out something that isn't too much hassle for anyone, but that is slightly less tumbleweedy.

- Kristian Lyngstøl / Telenor Norge (some sort of developer)

[1] https://community.grafana.com/t/new-alternative-to-scripted-dashboards/36791

[Daniel Lee]

Hi Kristian,

This is a good place to post a question like this - better than Slack or Community. The mailing list is quite new but we intend make this the place to have conversations like this. I will point the right people at Jostein's post so that the discussion can get started properly. We are also starting monthly meetings which would be a good place to discuss anything that has not made progress on the mailing list. If that is not enough then we can discuss some more regular meetings.

/Daniel (Grafana Labs, Manager for the Grafana team and former core developer)

[Torkel Ödegaard]

Hi, 

Doing a completely new take on scripted & dynamic dashboards has been a dream of mine for years. I have dreamed of a way to build truly dynamic dashboards where the queries are on the dashboard level and based on query results + logic can generate a dynamic layout suitable for that system state. 

Repeated panels is a feature I have never really liked. It has always felt backwards to me to have a data query that fills a variable option array that Grafana then use to repeat a panel, and for each repeated panel Grafana will then issue another data query (in some cases the same data query) to get the data to display FOR EACH panel. 

Making a dynamic script that built a dashboard.json scheme that included variables + panel queries felt similarly bad. The dynamic script would most likely also need to issue data queries to create a dynamic dashboard that would then issue further data queries once loaded (possibly the same queries). 

The solution for me feels like why not sidestep the whole dashboard.json creation process and have the script issue data queries and generate a dynamic live dashboard model. The script could then respond to user interactions to dynamically change the dashboard model. 

This is why the new react panels know nothing of query execution, they just get their data passed down via props. 

I started experimenting with this concept at a very basic conceptual level 2 weeks ago. SUPER DUPER early. Trying to figure out if creating a script that returns an observable screen, with observable panels & data is a good idea. And a concept that It think could be powerful is an ability to nest these scripted dashboards (scenes I call them). So you can create small reusable mini dashboards or workflows that you can embed in other scenes. 

https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/dynamic-dashboards/public/app/features/dyndash/DynDashPage.tsx

The thing that I think will be the most challenging with this approach (Beyond making the scripts easy to write) is how to handle URL state so you can share a specific state. 

/Torkel 

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