Grafana Has a Free API — Build Dashboards and Query Metrics Programmatically

#devops #api #tutorial #monitoring

Grafana Cloud Free Tier Is Generous

Grafana Cloud gives you free monitoring with 10K metrics, 50GB logs, and 50GB traces. Their API lets you manage dashboards and query data programmatically.

Setup

Get your API key from grafana.com/orgs/YOUR_ORG/api-keys.

import requests

GRAFANA_URL = "https://your-org.grafana.net"
API_KEY = "your_grafana_api_key"
HEADERS = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"}

List Dashboards

def list_dashboards():
    r = requests.get(f"{GRAFANA_URL}/api/search", headers=HEADERS,
                     params={"type": "dash-db"})
    return [{"title": d["title"], "uid": d["uid"], "url": d["url"]}
            for d in r.json()]

for d in list_dashboards():
    print(f"{d[title]} — {d[uid]}")

Create a Dashboard

def create_dashboard(title, panels):
    dashboard = {
        "dashboard": {
            "title": title,
            "panels": panels,
            "timezone": "browser"
        },
        "overwrite": False
    }
    r = requests.post(f"{GRAFANA_URL}/api/dashboards/db",
                      headers=HEADERS, json=dashboard)
    return r.json()

# Create a simple panel
panels = [{
    "title": "CPU Usage",
    "type": "timeseries",
    "gridPos": {"h": 8, "w": 12, "x": 0, "y": 0},
    "targets": [{"expr": "rate(process_cpu_seconds_total[5m])"}]
}]

create_dashboard("My Server Dashboard", panels)

Query Prometheus Data

def query_prometheus(query, start=None, end=None):
    params = {"query": query}
    r = requests.get(f"{GRAFANA_URL}/api/datasources/proxy/1/api/v1/query",
                     headers=HEADERS, params=params)
    return r.json()["data"]["result"]

# Get current CPU usage
result = query_prometheus("rate(process_cpu_seconds_total[5m])")
for r in result:
    print(f"{r[metric]}: {r[value][1]}")

Create Alerts

def create_alert_rule(name, query, threshold):
    rule = {
        "name": name,
        "condition": "gt",
        "threshold": threshold,
        "query": query,
        "for": "5m"
    }
    # Simplified - actual API is more complex
    r = requests.post(f"{GRAFANA_URL}/api/ruler/grafana/api/v1/rules/default",
                      headers=HEADERS, json=rule)
    return r.json()