Dash0 Terraform Provider

Terraform Integration in Dash0

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) software tool created by HashiCorp. It allows users to define and provision data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.

Dash0 offers a Terraform provider that enables you to manage your dashboards, synthetic checks, check rules, and custom views as code, bringing the same benefits of version control, collaboration, and automation to your observability resources that you already enjoy with your infrastructure.

For more information, visit the Terraform Project Page.

Use Cases

The Dash0 Terraform Provider allows you to:

• Define and manage dashboards using Terraform configuration
• Deploy and maintain synthetic checks for proactive monitoring
• Create and maintain check rules for alerting and monitoring
• Deploy custom views for enhanced data visualization
• Emit deployment markers and log events from Terraform via actions, so a terraform apply shows up as a dashboard annotation
• Version control your observability resources alongside your infrastructure code
• Automate deployment of monitoring resources as part of your CI/CD pipelines
• Ensure consistent monitoring and alerting across different environments
• Apply infrastructure-as-code best practices to your observability resources
• Easily replicate dashboards, synthetic checks, alerts, and views across teams and projects

Setup Dash0 Terraform Provider

The Dash0 Terraform Provider allows you to manage your dashboards, check rules, and custom views as code, bringing infrastructure-as-code practices to your observability resources.

Step 1: Configure the Terraform Provider

Add the Dash0 provider to your Terraform configuration:

Step 2: Set up Authentication

The provider interacts with Dash0 through the public API. You need to specify which API endpoint to use and the auth token to use. Right now, this is done via environment variables:

Step 3: Managing Dashboards as Code

You can download a dashboard's source YAML directly from the Dash0 UI by navigating to Dashboards in the main menu, selecting the desired dashboard, opening Settings > Source, and clicking Download YAML.

Step 4: Managing Synthetic Checks

Synthetic checks enable you to monitor your services proactively by running automated tests against your endpoints:

You can download a synthetic check's source YAML from the Dash0 UI by going to Synthetics in the main menu, selecting the check, and clicking Download YAML. This allows you to version control your synthetic monitoring configurations and deploy them consistently across environments.

Step 5: Managing Check Rules

Check rules enable you to define alerting rules in Prometheus Rule format for monitoring your services:

Step 6: Managing Views

Views allow you to create custom data visualizations and organize your observability data:

Step 7: Sending Deployment Events and Log Events

Actions are point-in-time operations you invoke from Terraform. Unlike the resources above, they hold no state and are not reconciled on every plan — a good fit for marking the exact moment terraform apply deploys something, or for sending an arbitrary log event. Actions require Terraform 1.14 or later.

Actions send telemetry via OTLP rather than the API, so they need a second endpoint alongside the authentication you set up in Step 2:

Deployment events

dash0_deployment_event sends a dash0.deployment event that Dash0 overlays on dashboards as an annotation, so "what changed right before this graph moved?" has an answer. Attach it to whatever resource represents your deployment with a lifecycle action_trigger block:

Log events

dash0_log_event sends an arbitrary log event, mirroring the dash0 logs send CLI command. It does not need to be attached to a resource — invoke it on its own:

For the full list of available attributes, see the dash0_deployment_event and dash0_log_event action reference.

Provider Documentation

For detailed documentation on available resources, configuration options, and usage examples, visit the Dash0 Terraform Provider in the Terraform Registry.