I use Ansible + Jinja2 templates to create and update my dashboards. Minor tweaks and changes can be pushed to hundreds of dashboards using the grafana API
I don't have an easy way of sharing this but I'm free to answer any questions about it.
My process is
1. identify services that benefit from a generated dashboard (a service that I am running hundreds of instances of, for instance)
2. create the first dashboard by manually
3. export the dashboard to JSON and turn it into a jinja2 template
4. use ansible to access the cloud provider api to get whatever metadata I need to populate the now templated dashboard
5. store the updated dashboard as code and also push it to Grafana via API with Ansible
This is all automated and you can skip all the way to step 4/5 if you plumb this to your service build/delivery automation.