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Overview

New Relic Dashboard Builder is a command line tool for declaratively configuring New Relic dashboards using YAML files.

Design Goals

New Relic Dashboard Builder was designed to help solve the problem of effectively managing a large and growing number of dashboards used to monitor a wide variety of services. It aims to fulfill two design goals that could not be met with using the New Relic UI to create and maintain dashboards:

  1. Allow New Relic dashboards to be managed in source control by defining them in simple, human-readable text files.
  2. Reduce duplication of query definitions to support easier maintenance of dashboards by
    • Allowing the same query definition to be reused in multiple dashboards.
    • Allowing portions of queries to be combined and reused across multiple queries.

The design of New Relic Dashboard Builder was inspired by the Jenkins Job Builder tool.

Installation

The New Relic Dashboard Builder command line tool that can be installed from PyPI using pip

pip install nrdash

Note

New Relic Dashboard Builder only works with Python 3.6 or higher.

Usage

To use New Relic Dashboard Builder, you must first acquire an admin New Relic API key. Once you have an admin API key, you can configure your New Relic dashboards using the definitions in the YAML definition file by running the nrdash command line tool.

nrdash --api-key <YOUR_ADMIN_API_KEY> --account-id <YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID> <DASHBOARD_DEFINITION_YAML_FILE>