Grafana Has a Free API: Build Dashboards for Any Data Source

#monitoring #devops #observability #dashboards

Why Grafana

Grafana is the visualization standard. Connect to Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Loki — 150+ data sources. Build dashboards that your entire team can use.

Install

# Docker
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana-oss

# Helm on K8s
helm install grafana grafana/grafana -n monitoring

Grafana API

# Create a dashboard
curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/api/dashboards/db \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"dashboard": {"title": "My Dashboard", "panels": []}, "overwrite": false}'

# List dashboards
curl http://localhost:3000/api/search?type=dash-db \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY'

# Export dashboard
curl http://localhost:3000/api/dashboards/uid/DASHBOARD_UID \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY'

Dashboard as Code (Grafonnet)

local grafana = import 'grafonnet/grafana.libsonnet';
local dashboard = grafana.dashboard;
local prometheus = grafana.prometheus;
local graph = grafana.graphPanel;

dashboard.new('My Service')
.addPanel(
  graph.new('Request Rate')
  .addTarget(
    prometheus.target('rate(http_requests_total[5m])', legendFormat='{{method}}')
  ),
  gridPos={h: 8, w: 12, x: 0, y: 0}
)

Alerting

apiVersion: 1
contactPoints:
  - orgId: 1
    name: slack-alerts
    receivers:
      - uid: slack-1
        type: slack
        settings:
          url: https://hooks.slack.com/services/xxx
alerts:
  - title: High Error Rate
    condition: B
    data:
      - refId: A
        queryType: range
        datasourceUid: prometheus
        model:
          expr: sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))

Key Features

150+ data sources — Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Postgres, MySQL, Elasticsearch
Alerting — unified alerting across all sources
Dashboards as Code — Terraform provider, Grafonnet, JSON
Annotations — mark deployments, incidents on graphs
Variables — dynamic, templated dashboards
AGPL v3 — fully open source

Resources

Need to extract dashboard configs, metric data, or monitoring setups? Check out my Apify tools or email spinov001@gmail.com for custom solutions.

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