Grafana uses Elasticsearch (optionally) to store its dashboards. If you ever migrate your Graphite/Grafana servers or simply need to grab all of your dashboards from the old server then you will likely be looking for them in Elasticsearch. Luckily, migrating to a new server and moving the dashboards is and uncomplicated and easy to do process. In this post I will walk through the process of moving Grafana dashboards between servers.
This guide assumes that Elasticsearch has been installed on both old and new servers. The first thing to look at is your current Grafana config. This is the file that you probably used to set up your Grafana environment originally. This file resides in the directory that you placed your Grafana server files in to, and is named config.js. There is a block inside this config file that tells Elasticsearch where to save dashboards, which by default is called “grafana-dashboards” which should look something like this:
/** * Elasticsearch index for storing dashboards * */ grafana_index: "grafana-dash-orig",
Now, if you still have access to the old server it is merely a matter of copying this Elasticsearch directory that houses your Grafana dashboard over to the new location. By default on an Ubuntu installation the Elasticsearch data files get placed in to the following path:
/var/lib/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/grafana-dashboards
Replace “0” with the node if this is a clustered Elasticsearch instance, otherwise you should see the grafana-dashboard directory. Simply copy this directory over to the new server with rsync or scp and put it in a temporary location for the time being (like /tmp for example). Rename the existing grafana-dashboards directory to something different, in case there are some newly created dashboards that you would like to retrieve. Then move the original dashboards (from the old server) from the /tmp directory in to the above path, renaming it to grafana-dashboard. The final step is to chown the directory and its contents. The steps for accomplishing this task are similar to the following.
On the old host:
cd /var/lib/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/ rsync -avP -e ssh grafana-dashbaords/ user@remote_host:/tmp/
On the new host:
cd /var/lib/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/ mv grafana-dashboards grafana-dash-orig mv /tmp/grafana-dashboards ./grafana-dashboards chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch grafana-dashboards
You don’t even need to restart the webserver or Elasticsearch for the old dashboards to show up. Just reload the page and bam. Dashboards.
