Summary
The docs cover exporting dashboards as NDJSON via Saved Objects and importing them, but these are presented as migration tools, not as a development workflow. No documentation covers the increasingly common pattern of treating dashboards as version-controlled code artifacts.
Proposal
Add a how-to guide under the Dashboards section — something like "Manage dashboards as code" — covering:
- Export a dashboard definition (via the upcoming Dashboard API)
- Store it in Git for version control and diffability
- Review changes through pull requests
- Deploy to target environments (different spaces, clusters, or stages)
This guide should cover practical concerns like:
- Handling IDs when deploying to different environments
- Managing references to data views or saved searches
- Dealing with inline vs. saved-object-reference panels
This blog post contains practical information we can use https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/kibana-dashboards-as-code-terraform-api
Timing
This pairs naturally with the upcoming public launch of the Dashboard and Lens Visualization REST APIs, which provide a cleaner, more diffable format than raw Saved Objects NDJSON. Consider coordinating this guide with that API documentation.
Why this matters
DevOps and SRE teams increasingly want to manage observability dashboards the same way they manage infrastructure — as code, in Git, with review workflows. This pattern is well-established in other tools (Grafana dashboards-as-code, Terraform) but has no equivalent guide in the Elastic docs.
Origin
Identified during a review of the kibana-dashboards agent skill in elastic/agent-skills-sandbox, which is built entirely around this workflow — declarative dashboard definitions designed for Git storage and LLM-assisted generation.
Summary
The docs cover exporting dashboards as NDJSON via Saved Objects and importing them, but these are presented as migration tools, not as a development workflow. No documentation covers the increasingly common pattern of treating dashboards as version-controlled code artifacts.
Proposal
Add a how-to guide under the Dashboards section — something like "Manage dashboards as code" — covering:
This guide should cover practical concerns like:
This blog post contains practical information we can use https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/kibana-dashboards-as-code-terraform-api
Timing
This pairs naturally with the upcoming public launch of the Dashboard and Lens Visualization REST APIs, which provide a cleaner, more diffable format than raw Saved Objects NDJSON. Consider coordinating this guide with that API documentation.
Why this matters
DevOps and SRE teams increasingly want to manage observability dashboards the same way they manage infrastructure — as code, in Git, with review workflows. This pattern is well-established in other tools (Grafana dashboards-as-code, Terraform) but has no equivalent guide in the Elastic docs.
Origin
Identified during a review of the
kibana-dashboardsagent skill in elastic/agent-skills-sandbox, which is built entirely around this workflow — declarative dashboard definitions designed for Git storage and LLM-assisted generation.