Allow providing dashboard's JSON in base64 gzipped format

[iRevive]

Hello!

I’m developing a provider that allows describing Grafana dashboards using HCL.

For example:

# Define Grafana provider
provider "grafana" {
  url  = "https://grafana.example.com/"
  auth = var.grafana_auth
}

# Create your dashboard
resource "grafana_dashboard" "my_dashboard" {
  config_json = data.gdashboard_dashboard.dashboard.json # the JSON representation of the dashboard
}

data "gdashboard_dashboard" "dashboard" {
  title = "My dashboard"

  layout {
    section {
      title = "Basic Details"

      panel {
        size = {
          height = 8
          width  = 10
        }
        source = data.gdashboard_stat.status.json
      }
    }
  }
}

data "gdashboard_stat" "status" {
  title       = "Status"
  description = "Shows the status of the container"

  field {
    mappings {
      value {
        value        = "1"
        display_text = "UP"
        color        = "green"
      }

      special {
        match        = "null+nan"
        display_text = "DOWN"
        color        = "red"
      }
    }
  }

  queries {
    prometheus {
      uid     = "prometheus"
      expr    = "up{container_name='container'}"
      instant = true
    }
  }
}

Unfortunately, the JSON output may become rather big when managing dashboards with many panels. As a result, the state file will grow, too. For example, 20+ dashboards with 20-30 panels each can easily occupy 20 MBs of the state file.

If the state file is stored in remote storage (e.g. S3), it takes 30-90 seconds only to download the file, which makes updates notably slow.

To keep the state file compact, I would like to keep the JSON representation gzipped and base64 encoded.

Since base64gunzip does not exist in the terraform (Feature request: gunzip function · Issue #22568 · hashicorp/terraform · GitHub), the stored content needs to be decoded by the Grafana plugin.

---

Would it be feasible to add a new config_json_base64_gzip (or any other suitable name) property to the dashboard resource? If so, I can work on the implementation.

[julienduchesne]

I'll close this one in favor of #1288. The goal is the same: reducing the amount of json that goes into the state. If something were to be implemented, it'd be a similar solution