How to modify Dasboards in pmm2 docker installation

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) PMM 2.x
1

I think about to modify some of the dashboards or more the variables to not have the selection “All” at the start, but to not allow “All” since we have more then 500 MySQL instances and it makes no sense to load all servers for a certain dashboard where maybe only 1 cluster shall be checked.

Is it somehow possible to modify dashboards and save them easily to change this behaviour?

1 Like
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Hi @Boemm, please check this section from the PMM Docs: Manage dashboards.

Give it a try and see if that works for you, you can modify Dashboards, create a new Home Dashboard among other options.

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Hi Mauricio, thanks for your response.

The link you send is mostly for moving Dashboards around, creating Dashboard folders and Delete some Dashboards, even to set Home Dashboard and Permissions …
But not to change a existing Dashboard and persist the changes.

I dived a bit deeper and understand the provisioning approach, which is used by PMM (introduced by Grafana) at least for the Docker PMM version.

The Dashboards are loaded from within the docker container and must be changed in the sources, which are used for provisioning the dashboards.
This would be 1 way, but I afraid, if I change things there the next docker image update will kick out my changes again.
A easy way to change them without exporting the json files from the UI and put them into the docker container is to set the option allowUiUpdates: true in the config file
“/usr/share/grafana/conf/provisioning/dashboards/default.yml”
But even this brings 2 issues with, the first is, that I have to change this in the dicker internal config file too (well could do, not that big issue) but the second is, that I afraid, even there my changes will be overwritten with the next update.

I mean, its pretty clear, that they will be overwritten, since one awaits, that with a update of the pmm version also the dashboards maybe changes and this new changes overwrites the previous version.

So in my opinion the best and right solution would be to fix the bug, which is it for me, since there are dashboards in version 2.35.0 which are not compatible with the 2.35.0 agent and client.
Or to change the client to deliver the needed metrics and labels.

What I not know is, if one can configure things in the agent, which changes metric names and labels.
This would also fix the problem …

Hope you get my point …
Best
Steffen

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I just tried out to set this allowUiUpdates: true in the provisioning config file and this brought, that I’m now able to change and save existing dashboards.
This is not bad for now, but with the above mentioned restrictions when the version is updated.

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Yes, it’s possible to modify and save dashboards to change the behavior of selecting “All” at the start. You can edit the variables in the dashboard and remove the “All” option, and then save the modified dashboard as a new version or overwrite the original dashboard.

To edit the variables, you can use the dashboard editor tool or directly edit the dashboard JSON file. Make sure to test the modified dashboard thoroughly before deploying it to ensure that it works as expected.