Generating larger dashboards for Grafana >=5

[0x63lv]

It appears that grafonnet-lib has an issue when generating larger dashboards without the row elements for Grafana 5 and 6.

As the jsonnet source file becomes larger (e.g. more addPanel fields), the jsonnet execution time gets increasingly slower, up to a point of it apparently hanging wile using all of the CPU until interrupted.

Used Grafana 5 example dashboard from the Readme as a test case.

# As-is from the Readme (some addTemplate blocks and 1 addPanel)
$> time jsonnet -J /path/to/grafonnet-lib example.jsonnet -o example.json
real	0m0.179s
user	0m0.163s
sys	0m0.014s

# With 15 addPanel blocks copy/pasted
real	0m2.439s
user	0m2.406s
sys	0m0.021s

# With 20 addPanel blocks
real	1m38.843s
user	1m36.830s
sys	0m0.267s

# With 30 addPanel blocks
(interrupted after)
real	3m59.107s
user	3m52.272s
sys	0m0.766s

Strangely, this issue is not evident, if enclosing all of these addPanel fields in an addRow field:

# Same 30 addPanels, but inside an addRow:
$> time jsonnet -J /path/to/grafonnet-lib example.jsonnet -o example.json
real	0m0.268s
user	0m0.240s
sys	0m0.018s

Using addRow, however, does not really fix anything. The row implementation changed in Grafana 5 with the introduction of "flexible grid". It appears that grafonnet-lib would still generate pre-Grafana 5 row structure (even with schemaVersion >=16), which cannot be properly imported into Grafana 5/6. When using schemaVersion <16, the resulting dashboard, when imported, does not take into account the specified gridPos directives.

Is this an issue with my approach or grafonnet-lib itself?

[roidelapluie]

Please use addPanels and not addPanel; it is much more efficient.

[0x63lv]

Was not aware such a construct exists. It indeed goes much faster if I use it. Thanks.