Grafana Has a Free Dashboard API That Most Monitoring Teams Underuse

#grafana #monitoring #api #devops

Grafana's HTTP API lets you create dashboards, manage alerts, query data sources, and automate monitoring — all programmatically. No clicking through the UI.

Authentication

# Create API key in Grafana UI → Configuration → API Keys
export GRAFANA_TOKEN="your-api-key"
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" http://localhost:3000/api/org

Dashboard API

# Create dashboard
curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/api/dashboards/db \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "dashboard": {
      "title": "API Metrics",
      "panels": [{
        "type": "timeseries",
        "title": "Request Rate",
        "gridPos": {"h": 8, "w": 12, "x": 0, "y": 0},
        "targets": [{
          "expr": "rate(http_requests_total[5m])",
          "legendFormat": "{{method}} {{path}}"
        }]
      }]
    },
    "overwrite": true
  }'

# Search dashboards
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" \
  "http://localhost:3000/api/search?query=api"

Alerting API

# Create alert rule
curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/api/v1/provisioning/alert-rules \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" \
  -d '{
    "title": "High Error Rate",
    "condition": "C",
    "data": [{
      "refId": "A",
      "queryType": "",
      "model": {"expr": "rate(http_errors_total[5m])"}
    }],
    "for": "5m"
  }'

# List alert rules
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" \
  http://localhost:3000/api/v1/provisioning/alert-rules

Data Source Proxy

# Query Prometheus through Grafana
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" \
  "http://localhost:3000/api/datasources/proxy/1/api/v1/query?query=up"

# Query InfluxDB through Grafana
curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" \
  http://localhost:3000/api/datasources/proxy/2/query \
  -d '{"db":"mydb","q":"SELECT mean(value) FROM cpu WHERE time > now() - 1h GROUP BY time(5m)"}'

Automation Script

import requests

GRAFANA = "http://localhost:3000"
headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {TOKEN}"}

# Export all dashboards
dashboards = requests.get(f"{GRAFANA}/api/search", headers=headers).json()
for d in dashboards:
    full = requests.get(f"{GRAFANA}/api/dashboards/uid/{d['uid']}", headers=headers).json()
    with open(f"dashboards/{d['uid']}.json", 'w') as f:
        json.dump(full, f, indent=2)

Why This Matters

Infrastructure as code: Version-control your dashboards
Automated alerts: Create alerting rules programmatically
Multi-datasource: Query any datasource through one API
Dashboard provisioning: Deploy monitoring with your code

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