Grafana Organization: Folders, Permissions, Provisioning, and Dashboard Lifecycle

Folder Structure Strategy#

Grafana folders organize dashboards and control access through permissions. The folder structure you choose determines how teams find dashboards and who can edit them. Three patterns work in practice, each suited to a different organizational shape.

By Team#

When teams own distinct services and rarely need cross-team dashboards:

Platform/
  Node Overview
  Kubernetes Cluster
  Networking
Backend/
  API Gateway
  User Service
  Payment Service
Frontend/
  Web Vitals
  CDN Performance
Data/
  Kafka Pipelines
  ETL Jobs
  Data Quality

Each team gets Editor access to their folder and Viewer access to everything else. This works well when ownership boundaries are clear.