When should you use dashboards-as-code instead of the UI editor?

Use dashboards-as-code (via the Terraform provider or the dashboards API with exported JSON) when a dashboard needs to be reviewed through a pull request, replicated identically across multiple environments or accounts, or kept in sync with an infrastructure-as-code workflow that already governs everything else.

The UI editor remains the faster path for exploratory, one-off dashboards during an active investigation, where the overhead of a commit-review-apply cycle would slow down getting an answer, and where the dashboard may not need to persist or be replicated anywhere.

A common pattern is prototyping quickly in the UI, then exporting the finished layout into version control once it's proven useful enough to standardize on and share across teams or environments.

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