topic Re: Monaco support state management in Open Q&A

Monaco support state management

RishiSuthar — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 06:42:38 GMT

Hi,

Does Monaco support state like Terraform?

Ex. If dashboard already exists in the target and you modify it in the source system. When performing the push with Monaco will Monaco recognize the same dashboard exists but just needs to be updated? Or will it create a duplicate dashboard with the updated changes?

Re: Monaco support state management?

p_devulapalli — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:59:26 GMT

Hi @RishiSuthar

I think monaco does not yet support state management similar to terraform does . It just applies the config based on the current sate of the configuration file , however if you are trying to make changes to config and apply to an existing dashboard in your environment it can check if a dashboard with similar config already exists and update the dashboard with changes

Re: Monaco support state management?

MarwanC — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:16:57 GMT

Hi Rishi,

To help you answer this question with detailed accurancy, I prepared this answer based on our POC results that we used to compare Monaco vs Terraform, I hope this is useful to you and to anyone in the community who is asking the same question.

Monaco CLI does not support state management in the same way as Terraform does but is not a big issue to manage.

What Monaco Does Instead

Monaco applies configurations based on the current state of your source files, not by tracking the target environment’s state.

It performs idempotent updates—meaning if a dashboard or config already exists, Monaco will attempt to update it rather than duplicate it.

There’s no .tfstate equivalent, no drift detection, and no rollback mechanism built into Monaco.

Implications for Your Workflows

Given your focus on governance and automation integrity:

You’ll need to validate configurations manually or via dry runs before applying them.

For environments with frequent changes, consider external tracking mechanisms (e.g. Git history, Dynatrace API queries) to simulate state awareness.

If you're integrating Monaco with Terraform, Terraform can manage state while Monaco handles config deployment—though they’ll operate independently.

I strongly recommend state update via artifacts by saving the previous version of the JSON dashboard at every level

You do not need to rely on this complexity of terraform if all functionality is already available in Monaco

Please share your experiece here if you are already a seasoned user of terraform or monaco or both?

Hope this helps

Re: Monaco support state management?

deni — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 15:31:50 GMT

@MarwanC I have no real experience to share, I'm still learning and experimenting with Monaco (still don't have any experience with Terraform).

I just what to say Thank you very much for this detailed explanation.

Re: Monaco support state management

tarjei_statkraf — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:50:02 GMT

Does anyone have experience with using state stored in Gitlab / Github or similar with the terraform module?

The lineages does not work for me when I do multiple -import state with the terraform module

Re: Monaco support state management?

Shea0410 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 11:53:56 GMT

I thought it would be cool to combine both of them: use Terraform for things that genuinely need state (environments, core config, credentials), and Monaco for Dynatrace config like dashboards, alerts, and SLOs where a more declarative approach matters.