Grafana Backup

Update: I’m preserving the post below for posterity, but I had the obvious solution in the final sentence - I changed my setup to run Grafana from Docker and mount a folder from my external Hard Drive (I haven’t saved up for a NAS yet!), and now my dashboard definition is persistent across restarts/re-images.

I’ve installed Grafana to monitor the Raspberry Pis in my homelab setup, but after a bit of poking around I couldn’t find a file that contains the dashboard configuration that can be backed-up to prevent losing configuration if the image/Pi crashed (remember to check your backups!). To that end, I created a backup script that retrieves a JSON representation of the currently-saved dashboards, checks if there have been any updates against the previously-saved version (using a hash), and persists it if so. Cron-scheduling of the backup happens here in my general Pi-setup script.

It’s not ideal to have the Grafana username and password persisted into a cron definition - one day I’ll update it to use an API Key (though, before that, I’d like to automate the setup of Grafana itself, such as adding the Prometheus data source and the admin user). Honestly in hindsight I can’t remember why I installed Grafana via apt-get install and systemctl start rather than with Docker as here. That way, I could just mount a directory from my hard drive (or, one day, NAS) to persist configuration options.

• homelab