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
