[Feature Request]: garbage collection / prune

[kshpytsya]

Feature Request

A cursory examination of code and documentation shows that Grizzly is missing the "D" letter of CRUD. This Tanka's feature could possibly be the source of inspiration. Grafana's tags could be used as a marker for resources managed by Grizzly. And/or it should be possible to declare that Grizzly should manage everything in a specific folder.

I am aware of Grafana Terraform Provider and of Grafana Operator but out of three, it is Grizzly that is best suited for our deployment workflow.

[malcolmholmes]

We've considered prune, a la Tanka. But, there's no consistent place across resource types to store the marker. Yes, we could use tags on dashboards, but without somewhere to put them on folders, datasources, alert rules, etc, we're stuck. That's what blocked us from implementing this in the past.

[kshpytsya]

Do all the resources manageable by Grizzly have UIDs that can be arbitrarily chosen by their creator? If so, how about using a UID prefix as a marker?

[malcolmholmes]

That's an interesting idea. Although it wouldn't work for existing resources. And for existing dashboards, it'd change the URL, which sucks.

[kshpytsya]

A further extension to that idea:

A --manifest option allowing to provide a text file containing one UID per line with wildcard support (could be as simple as only allowing an asterisk at the end). With this Grizzly would refuse any resource definitions not covered by the manifest, and would treat all server resources matching the manifest as managed by Grizzly. Combined with --prune option to apply it would instruct Grizzly to delete any matching resources for which there are no local definitions.

A manifest (or update-manifest) command that would update the existing manifest file (or create a new one if none exists) with UIDs of locally defined resources. Maybe --sorted and --prune options to sort UIDs in manifest and remove lines that do not correspond to any locally defined resource. This command would probably be used in a one-off fashion when introducing the grizzly apply --prune into the workflow.

[kshpytsya]

Related: #490