Before we start defining subcommands within our Grafana plugin, please make sure you have followed the Installation Guide to ensure you have all the components setup and the Grafana application and image rendering service is reachable from Nautobot.
Once these steps are complete, we can start defining subcommands within our Grafana Plugin!
The /grafana chat command can accommodate custom subcommands.
To define a subcommand within the Grafana Plugin for use with your chat client, there are two main components that we need to have populated.
- Define at least one Grafana Dashboard.
- Define at least one Grafana Panel within the Dashboard.
This tutorial will take you through the steps noted above to get a chat subcommand exposed in your chat client.
The first step is to define a dashboard so that the Grafana plugin is aware of the dashboard that exist within Grafana. You can define a dashboard in Grafana in two ways, defining a dashboard manually, or using the "Sync" feature to synchronize your Grafana dashboards automatically.
To define a dashboard manually, you can do so by going to Plugins > Dashboards and clicking the + Add button
located in the upper-right of the screen. In the modal for a new dashboard, you need to define the slug,
uid, and Friendly Name.
NOTE: You can find the slug and uid info by navigating to your Grafana instance and going to the desired dashboard,
Alternatively, you can define a set of dashboards by synchronizing your Grafana dashboard configuration to the
Grafana plugin. To synchronize dashboards, navigate to Plugins > Dashboards and clicking the Sync button.
This process will utilize the DiffSync library to synchronize, create , update, and delete dashboards in Nautobot with the Dashboards that are defined in the Grafana application. Once complete, you will see all dashboards imported into Nautobot.
The second step to defining Grafana subcommands in Nautobot for your chat client is to define the panels you wish to expose via chat.
Panels are closely associated to chat subcommands, where there will be a chat subcommand for each panel defined.
Similar to dashboards, you can define panels in two ways within Nautobot.
To define a panel manually, you can do so by going to Plugins > Panels and clicking the + Add button
located in the upper-right of the screen. In the modal for a new panel, you need to select the dashboard that the
panel is defined under, then add a subcommand name, along with a friendly name, and defined the Panel ID.
The Active checkbox will allow the subcommand to show up in your chat client. If the panel is marked as inactive, it
will still be defined in Nautobot, but restricted from being shown in the chat client.
NOTE: You can find the panel id by navigating to your the desired panel, selecting
View, then looking at the URL.
Alternatively, you can define a set of panels by synchronizing your Grafana panels configuration for a given dashboard to the
Grafana plugin. To synchronize panels for a dashboard, navigate to Plugins > Panels and clicking the Sync button.
This process will utilize the DiffSync library to synchronize, create , update, and delete panels in Nautobot with the Dashboard Panels that are defined in the Grafana application. Once complete, you will see all panels for a dashboard imported into Nautobot.
Panels are synchronized on a per-dashboard basis. All panels synchronized will be
INACTIVEby default, you will need to set them to active to see in Chat.
Once dashboards and panels have been defined in Nautobot, you have the ability to mark any panels as active and you can now get all the insighs provided by Grafana graphs readily available in Chat!
See the Advanced Usage documentation to go even further with Grafana chat subcommands by enabling Dashboard Variables to customize and filter your Grafana graphs!
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