dashboard analyze-export

Purpose

Analyze dashboard export directories through the canonical dashboard analyze command.

When to use

Use this when you want to read a local export tree, inspect its structure, or render governance and dependency views without contacting Grafana. Prefer dashboard analyze --input-dir ... in new docs and scripts.

Before / After

• Before: an export tree is just a folder of JSON files, and you still have to guess which dashboards, variables, or policy checks matter.
• After: one analysis pass turns that tree into operator views you can review, hand to CI, or feed into later checks such as topology and governance-gate.

Key flags

• --input-dir: dashboard export root to analyze.
• --input-format: choose raw or provisioning.
• --input-type: select raw or source when the export root has multiple dashboard variants.
• --output-format: render text, table, csv, json, yaml, tree, tree-table, dependency, dependency-json, governance, governance-json, or queries-json views.
• --interactive: open the shared analysis workbench.
• --output-file: write the result to disk.
• --no-header: suppress table-like headers.

Examples

# Purpose: Analyze dashboard export directories through the canonical dashboard analyze command.
grafana-util dashboard analyze --input-dir ./dashboards/raw --input-format raw --output-format table

# Purpose: Analyze dashboard export directories through the canonical dashboard analyze command.
grafana-util dashboard analyze --input-dir ./dashboards/provisioning --input-format provisioning --output-format governance-json

What success looks like

• you can explain what is inside an export tree without manually opening dozens of dashboard files
• governance or dependency output is stable enough to hand to CI or a second operator
• later checks such as dashboard topology, dashboard impact, or dashboard governance-gate can start from the inspect artifacts instead of re-reading the raw tree

Failure checks

• if the export tree looks incomplete, confirm whether you are pointing at raw or provisioning content before you trust the report
• if a later command cannot consume the result, check whether you emitted governance-json or another analysis artifact shape by mistake
• if the tree came from an older export, rerun dashboard export first so you do not analyze stale files

Related commands

• dashboard export
• dashboard diff
• dashboard governance-gate