grafonnet-lib VS cortex-jsonnet

I honestly... don't know. I have been using Jsonnet to programatically generate Grafana dashboards, because AFAIK the only official library to generate them is written in Jsonnet [1].

In my experience, it works, but it doesn't really give me any distinct advantage. Maybe for things that look almost like JSON it'd be helpful, but the moment you start dealing with more complex generations you start finding lack of typing, lack of IDE support, lack of easy debugging, etc, fairly problematic. For example, something I really dislike is that due to how the expressions are evaluated, the only way to add debug/trace statements is to use them to "transform" a value you're going to use, if you don't use the result of the trace in the final output, the trace does not appear.

1: https://github.com/grafana/grafonnet-lib

Jsonnet

I recently started working with Grafana for my bachelor thesis. I want to evaluate scripting libraries like grafonnet to create dashboards.

It’s not something that is well documented but the cortex binary takes a mode flag to tell it what to do - either everything, or one of the specific components eg querier. All the production config for Grafana cloud is here if you want to check it out: https://github.com/grafana/cortex-jsonnet

We use this with some of our dashboards but its pretty much deprecated. See https://github.com/grafana/cortex-jsonnet/tree/main/cortex-mixin/dashboards