Introducing our Terraform provider: Dashboards as Code

Ever wished you could automatically generate a detailed and targeted dashboard at the end of your CI/CD pipeline for immediate visibility into your new deployments? Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing at SquaredUp, and we're excited to share our approach to integrating Dashboards as Code.

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

At its core, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows you to manage and provision IT infrastructure through code rather than through manual processes. With IaC, you can define everything from data sources to workspaces, dashboards, and even notifications in a script, which then consistently and reliably creates and updates your environment. At SquaredUp, we use IaC to streamline the deployment and management of internal dashboards and monitor their health.

We’re constantly enhancing our toolset to include even more features.

Why Terraform?

HashiCorp's Terraform, our choice for IaC, is renowned for its versatility and strong community support. As a Terraform Technology Partner, we've developed a provider that seamlessly converts Terraform's HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) definitions into calls to the SquaredUp API. This means that you can define a dashboard in HCL, and Terraform will ensure it’s deployed and maintained accurately, reflecting any changes in your environment. Check out our Open Source Terraform Provider to see how it works.

Benefits of Dashboards as Code

At SquaredUp, deploying dashboards through code has revolutionized how we manage our internal IT operations. This approach not only brings uniformity and boosts efficiency across our dynamic IT landscape but also allows us to automate the creation of dashboards for each data source as they evolve.

Internally, this means we can immediately showcase new features and continuously monitor the health and performance of our infrastructure. Such automation minimizes manual setup, expedites deployment processes, and ensures that our team has instant access to essential performance and health metrics, facilitating proactive management and decision-making.

Get Hands-On

The best way to understand the power of Terraform with SquaredUp is by trying it out yourself. We’ve prepared a GitHub repository with three progressive examples. All you need is a SquaredUp account, and you can start creating dashboards right away.

These examples demonstrate:

• Basic Connectivity and Dashboard Creation: How to quickly set up and connect to SquaredUp using minimal Terraform code.
• Extending Functionality: How to dynamically create multiple dashboards based on external data sources.
• Advanced Variable Use and Resource Deployment: How to leverage Terraform’s full capabilities to manage complex deployments.

Stay Connected

If you run into challenges or have questions, don’t hesitate to participate in discussions on Community Answers or contribute to our GitHub repository. Your feedback and contributions are invaluable as we continue to refine and expand our tools.

Happy dashboarding!