dashboard governance-gate

Purpose

Evaluate governance policy directly against live Grafana or a local export tree, with saved analysis artifacts as an advanced reuse path.

When to use

Use this when you want a policy pass or fail result before promotion. Prefer direct live or local analysis inputs for the common path; keep governance-json and queries-json for advanced reuse and CI pipelines.

Before / After

• Before: teams can export dashboards and inspect them, but policy violations still need a human to spot them one by one.
• After: governance-gate turns those artifacts into an explicit pass/fail decision with machine-readable findings for CI or review.

Key flags

• --policy-source: choose file or builtin.
• --policy: policy file path when using file-based policy input.
• --builtin-policy: named built-in policy when using builtin policy input.
• --url: analyze live Grafana directly.
• --input-dir: analyze a local export tree directly.
• --input-format: choose raw or provisioning when analyzing local exports.
• --governance: path to dashboard inspect governance JSON (governance-json artifact, advanced reuse).
• --queries: path to dashboard inspect query-report JSON (queries-json artifact, advanced reuse).
• --output-format: render text or JSON.
• --json-output: optionally write the normalized result JSON.
• --interactive: open the interactive terminal browser over findings.

Examples

# Purpose: Evaluate governance policy against live Grafana directly.
grafana-util dashboard governance-gate --url http://localhost:3000 --basic-user admin --basic-password admin --policy-source file --policy ./policy.yaml

# Purpose: Evaluate governance policy against a local export tree directly.
grafana-util dashboard governance-gate --input-dir ./dashboards/raw --input-format raw --policy-source builtin --builtin-policy default --output-format json --json-output ./governance-check.json

# Purpose: Advanced reuse: evaluate governance policy against reusable analysis artifacts.
grafana-util dashboard governance-gate --policy-source builtin --builtin-policy default --governance ./governance.json --queries ./queries.json --output-format json --json-output ./governance-check.json

What success looks like

• policy checks fail before promotion, not after a dashboard lands in the wrong environment
• text output is readable enough for manual review, while JSON output is stable enough for CI gates
• the same artifacts can be rechecked after a policy change without rerunning export or inspect from scratch

Failure checks

• if the command fails immediately, confirm the policy source and whether the policy file path or builtin policy name is valid
• if the gate result seems incomplete, verify that governance and queries came from the same inspect run
• if automation reads the result, prefer --output-format json and validate the contract before treating a pass/fail as final

Related commands

• dashboard analyze (local)
• dashboard analyze (live)
• dashboard topology