Use Grafana for dashboards

Cost

Open source. AGPLv3 licence, free to run on your own servers. Grafana Cloud has a free tier and paid plans.

How to do it

Grafana reached 1.0 in January 2014. Version 13.2.4 came out on 13 October 2026, with fixes for 13.0 and 13.1 on the same day. The grafana/grafana image has over 5 billion pulls on Docker Hub. Grafana moved from Apache-2.0 to AGPLv3 in April 2021. AGPL only asks you to share changes you make to Grafana itself and offer to others over a network. Running it unchanged for your team adds no duty. It reads Prometheus, Loki, Postgres and OTLP backends. What goes on a dashboard is in Give each service one dashboard. Choose something else when your legal team bans AGPL, and use the dashboards of your managed metrics provider instead.

Examples

Using these examples: they show one way to follow this rule. Keep the behaviour and the check, not the syntax. Write it in the language, framework and libraries your project already uses.

YAML example

# provisioning/dashboards/files.yaml
apiVersion: 1
providers:
  - name: repository
    type: file
    options:
      path: /etc/grafana/dashboards

Shell example

curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" "https://grafana.example.com/api/search?type=dash-db" \
  | jq -r '.[].uid' | sort > live.txt
jq -r '.uid' dashboards/*.json | sort > repo.txt
comm -23 live.txt repo.txt

How to check

Every dashboard in production has a JSON file in the repository, loaded by provisioning. A script compares both lists and finds 0 dashboards that exist only in the UI.

Sources

• Grafana licensing
• Provision Grafana

Related rules

• Give each service one dashboard in Operations