Automating Grafana Dashboards Deployment with Ansible

Grafana is a powerful monitoring tool, but manually uploading dashboards can be tedious. In this guide, I’ll show how to automate Grafana dashboard deployment using Ansible. This approach is useful when managing multiple environments and dynamically adding new dashboards.

What will we do?

We’ll create an Ansible role ansible-role-grafana that:
✅ Creates folders in Grafana if they don’t exist.
✅ Uploads dashboards to the correct folders.

The role structure looks like this:

roles/ansible-role-grafana/
│── tasks/
│   ├── main.yml  # Main playbook tasks
│── templates/
│── vars/
│── dashboards/   # JSON dashboard files
|   |-- Kubernetes
|   |-- Loki
│── README.md

We create a playbook file ‘deploy_grafana.yml’:

---
- name: Deploy Grafana Dashboards
  hosts: localhost
  roles:
    - ansible-role-grafana

Define environment variables in ‘env.yaml’:

grafana_api: "http://grafana.example.com"
api_token: "your-api-token"
dashboards_dir: "/path/to/dashboards"