Set organization home dashboard

[jaehnri]

Closes #896

[jaehnri]

There's a small bug in the grafana-api-go-client that makes us unable to use the PATCH endpoint, having to GET first and then PUT. I solved it in this PR, so I'm waiting for a new release to change this.

[weisdd]

@jaehnri thanks for the PR!

Though, if I understand your code correctly, you're suggesting to update the org home dashboard upon reconciling any of the dashboards. That means, for 100 dashboards, the org settings will be updated 100 times.
Plus, Grafana API refuses to update the setting when you pass an uid that does not exist yet. Say, we have 100 dashboards and the operator just started. Then it can potentially run into two issues:

• If we look at the queue, and the target dashboard is on the 100th place there, the reconciliations for the first 99 dashboards will fail;
• If you specify a non-existent uid, reconciliation will never succeed for any of the dashboards.

Unfortunately, this setting is tricky, we need to come up with something more nuanced.

[jaehnri]

Hi, @weisdd! Thanks for the review.
We will only update Grafana Preferences whenever the check below is true:

grafana.Spec.Preferences != nil && uid == grafana.Spec.Preferences.HomeDashboardUID

That way, if a nonexistent dashboard is chosen, the condition above never holds true and simply no home dashboard will ever be set up. Also, we only send the PATCH after the dashboard creation, so we will never send a request with a UID that Grafana does not know (the uid variable is taken from the dashboardModel, used in the dashboard reconciliation). So, if a dashboard is not the home one, it simply skips this step, but it won't fail its reconciliation.

Also, it only makes the API call for the home dashboard after the check above, so there's no chance we will update the settings 100 times.

[weisdd]

@jaehnri Alright, it should work then. We'll look at the PR deeper in the coming days. Thanks for the clarification!

[NissesSenap]

For me, it feels a bit strange to have this config in the grafana CRD but have the Dashboard reconciler doing the work.
I can see how this will be a bit strange to debug in the future.

It especially gets strange if we want to start setting org timezone or grafana extend the api/org/preferences with something more useful that we might want to support.
At the same time, I understand that making this logic in the dashboard reconcile makes verifying that the UID exist much easier.
I don't have any good ideas for a better solution. At the same time, we should be practical. There is none that has pushed for these features earlier, so why would that change now?

So in the spirit of being practical, LGTM.

[weisdd]

@NissesSenap I'd agree, it's a good enough solution for now. If we ever come up with a better idea, we can reimplement the solution then.

As a side note, I've added a tiny fix - updated bundle manifest (make bundle).

[weisdd]

By the way, when a dashboard is deleted, the setting gets reset by Grafana itself, which nice :)

[jaehnri]

Thanks for the review! I agree the solution isn't as elegant as one would hope but it does work.
Still waiting for the grafana-api-golang-client fix, but I can open another PR whenever that gets released.