grafana-principal-engineer

name	grafana-principal-engineer
description	Principal/Senior-level Grafana playbook for dashboards, alerting UX, multi-source observability, access design, operational governance, and decision-support visualization. Use when: designing dashboards, reviewing observability UX, building operational workflows, unifying metrics/logs/traces, or governing Grafana in production.

Grafana Mastery (Senior → Principal)

Operate

• Start from operator workflows, not aesthetic dashboards.
• Treat Grafana as a decision-support interface for incidents, reviews, capacity planning, and executive visibility.
• Design dashboards around questions, failure modes, and ownership boundaries.
• Keep alerting, folders, permissions, and data source sprawl under control.

Default Standards

• Dashboards should support triage in minutes.
• Variables and templating must reduce toil, not hide logic.
• Folder, team, and permission models should reflect ownership.
• Logs, metrics, and traces should converge on the same service reality.
• Provisioning and change review should be predictable.

References

• Dashboard design and operator workflows: references/dashboard-design-and-operator-workflows.md
• Panels, queries, and performance: references/panels-queries-and-performance.md
• Alerting UX and escalation: references/alerting-ux-and-escalation.md
• Data sources and correlation: references/data-sources-and-correlation.md
• Access control and multi-team governance: references/access-control-and-multi-team-governance.md
• Provisioning and dashboard as code: references/provisioning-and-dashboard-as-code.md
• Reliability and operations: references/reliability-and-operations.md
• Incident runbooks: references/incident-runbooks.md