Technical documentation on Grafana Labs

gcx CLI

Fri, 15 May 2026 16:15:40 +0100

Overview

gcx is the Grafana CLI that allows you and your AI coding agent to work with Grafana Cloud, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana OSS.

gcx is designed to be used in common scenarios such as authentication against Grafana, query telemetry, inspect and manage resources, and automate observability workflows as code.

It’s also integrated with Grafana Assistant, combining the previously fragmented user experience into one single tool.

Get started

Grafana Beyla documentation

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 14:04:16 +0100

Grafana documentation

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 10:42:05 +0100

Grafana k6 documentation

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 11:18:23 +0000

OpenTelemetry at Grafana Labs

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:03:43 +0000

Overview

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides vendor-neutral instrumentation libraries, APIs, and tools. It helps you collect metrics, logs, traces, and profiles from your applications while protecting you from vendor lock-in and ensuring data portability across different observability platforms.

Grafana Labs supports OpenTelemetry as a core part of our observability strategy. We offer a comprehensive observability stack that helps you collect, ingest, store, analyze, and visualize telemetry data. Using OpenTelemetry with Grafana Labs gives you a flexible and scalable observability solution.

OpenTelemetry instrumentation

Instrument your applications by following our documentation or using Grafana Cloud onboarding workflows or integration connection tiles. Refer to the OpenTelemetry instrumentation documentation to get started.

OpenTelemetry Collector

Set up an OpenTelemetry Collector by following our documentation or using Grafana Cloud onboarding workflows or integration connection tiles. Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, provides additional features and integrations tailored for the Grafana ecosystem. Refer to the OpenTelemetry Collector documentation to get started.

Ingest OTLP data

Send your OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) data directly to Grafana Cloud or self-managed Grafana Loki, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo. Configure your instrumentation or Collector to transmit telemetry data to the appropriate endpoints. Grafana Cloud provides dedicated OTLP endpoints that simplify this process with automatic routing of metrics, logs, traces, and profiles to the right backend.

You can ingest OTLP data by following the documentation or using Grafana Cloud onboarding workflows or integration connection tiles. Refer to OTLP data ingestion to get started.

Gain application insights

Transform your OpenTelemetry data into actionable insights using Grafana’s visualization and analysis tools. With your applications instrumented and data pipelines configured, you can now detect performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and optimize application performance.

Application Observability: Get immediate visibility into application performance with pre-configured dashboards that automatically detect anomalies and help identify root causes
Grafana Drilldown: Navigate through your metrics, logs, traces, and profiles without writing complex queries using specialized Drilldown apps for Loki, Mimir, and Tempo
Alerts: Create and manage sophisticated alert rules based on your OpenTelemetry data to proactively detect and respond to issues before they impact users
Grafana IRM: Streamline incident response with integrated incident management that connects directly to your telemetry data for faster resolution
Grafana dashboards: Build custom visualizations and correlate data across different telemetry types to gain deeper insights into your applications
Grafana Mimir: Store and analyze metrics with this highly scalable Prometheus-compatible backend
Grafana Loki: Search and explore logs with this horizontally scalable log aggregation system
Grafana Tempo: Analyze distributed traces to troubleshoot complex transactions across services
Grafana Pyroscope: Identify code-level performance issues with continuous profiling data

Refer to the Application insights documentation to learn how to gain meaningful insights from your OpenTelemetry data.

By integrating OpenTelemetry with Grafana Labs products, you get comprehensive, scalable, and actionable observability for your applications.

Recommended setup for Grafana Cloud

Grafana Labs recommends that you set up OpenTelemetry components, including instrumentation and an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, using one of the Grafana Cloud setup guides.

These opinionated guides make it easy to get started. They include all the binaries, configuration, and connection parameters you need to set up OpenTelemetry for Grafana Cloud.

Grafana Cloud documentation

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:48:48 -0600

Overview

Grafana Cloud is a highly available, performant, and scalable observability platform for your applications and infrastructure. It provides a centralized view over all of your observability data, whether the data lives in Grafana Cloud Metrics services or in your own bare-metal and cloud environments. With native support for many popular data sources such as Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and Amazon CloudWatch, all you have to do to begin creating dashboards and querying metrics data is to configure data sources in Grafana Cloud.

To get started with a forever free Grafana Cloud account, create a Grafana Cloud account.

Guidance and help

whichgrafana

Which Grafana is right for you?

Answer a few questions and Grot will help you decide.

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Grafana Federal Cloud documentation

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 12:19:36 +0200

Grafana Federal Cloud

Grafana Federal Cloud, FedRAMP High authorized and DoD IL5 compliant, offers government agencies and organizations secure and reliable cloud-based monitoring for their infrastructure, applications, and services, ensuring data protection and compliance with stringent security standards.

Grafana Federal Cloud is a fully managed, highly scalable observability platform, powered by Grafana Mimir for Prometheus metrics, Grafana Loki for logs, Grafana Tempo for traces, and Grafana for data visualization.

By adhering to the FedRAMP High comprehensive security controls and continuous monitoring requirements, Grafana Federal Cloud provides a trusted and secure platform for managing sensitive federal data and applications. This commitment to compliance ensures that our cloud offerings provide the highest levels of data protection, integrity, and availability, enabling federal customers to leverage the power of Grafana for their observability needs with confidence.

Meet FedRAMP Compliance and Data Standards

Grafana Federal Cloud maintains FedRAMP High authorization through implementation of FedRAMP security controls and best practices to provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and information associated with those systems. This is independently validated by a third-party assessment organization (3PAO) and continuously monitored to maintain FedRAMP High status.

Grafana Federal Cloud vs Customer responsibilities

Federal Cloud’s primary responsibility is to deliver a secure, resilient, and compliant platform. The customer’s responsibility is to manage and control how Grafana Federal Cloud is used and who has access to the environment. Customer responsibilities are critical to maintaining a secure posture. The customer ultimately owns and is responsible for the data being sent and should take steps to ensure it is appropriately classified and managed.

Customer Support

Grafana Customer Support is available to Federal Cloud customers via the Grafana Cloud Portal. After onboarding, the administrators whose names you provide to Grafana Labs receive an invitation via email to join the Grafana Cloud Portal. This login is different from the login for your Federal Cloud environment.

An administrator can provide access to others in the organization via the Grafana Cloud Portal.

Caution
Before submitting a support request, refer to Safeguard data.

Use the Cloud Portal to request support

When you log in to Grafana.com and click My Account you’re taken to the Cloud Portal. A menu on the left-side menu provides support options, including the ability to open and view support tickets.

Safeguard data

The Grafana Cloud Portal lives outside of the FedRAMP authorization boundary. Don’t submit or include any information on your ticket that is FedRAMP sensitive. If your support case requires sharing sensitive information, Grafana Labs coordinates an approved secure channel.

Grafana Enterprise Logs documentation

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:48:23 +0200

Grafana Enterprise Traces documentation

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 07:27:22 -0400

Grafana Loki documentation

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:48:23 +0200

Grafana Mimir documentation

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 12:23:49 +0200

Grafana OnCall documentation

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:12:46 -0600

Grafana Pyroscope documentation

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:48:23 +0200

Grafana Tempo documentation

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:48:23 +0200

Grafana Agent Documentation

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 07:08:01 -0800

Grafana Alloy Documentation

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:22:41 +0100

Grafana Enterprise Metrics documentation

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:01:58 +0100

Grafana Labs Learning paths

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:41:09 +0100

k6 Studio

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 14:13:16 +0000

Overview

k6 Studio is a desktop application that lets you:

Record a user flow from browser interactions and generate a HAR file.
Generate and customize a k6 test script from a HAR file, including the ability to use rules to quickly iterate on the script creation process.
Generate a k6 browser test script, including browser interactions such as navigating to pages, interacting with elements on the page, text assertions, and more.
Test and debug k6 scripts using a visual interface. Inspect the request and response details for any request in your script.

The scripts you create in k6 Studio can be used to run performance tests in Grafana Cloud k6, or as k6 scripted checks in Synthetic Monitoring.

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Writers' Toolkit

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 11:09:48 +0100

Writers’ Toolkit

Writers’ Toolkit is for anyone who writes or edits customer-facing technical documentation for Grafana Labs. Use it as the source of truth for voice and tone, grammar, style, templates, and more.

Writers’ Toolkit helps you to create technical documentation that’s consistent and applies the voice and tone in use at Grafana Labs.

The style guide extends Google’s developer documentation style guide. If you can’t find guidance on a specific topic in Writers’ Toolkit, refer to Google’s style guide.

If it’s your first time using the guide, start with the Get started section.

Questions and feedback

Writers’ Toolkit is open source and available at grafana/writers-toolkit. If you have questions, or feedback on how to improve this documentation, open an issue and help make this an even better resource.

Copyright notice

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 10:10:33 +0200

Copyright notice

These materials and all Grafana Labs documentation is copyrighted and all rights are reserved by Raintank, Inc. dba Grafana Labs. The information in these materials is subject to change without notice, and Grafana Labs assumes no responsibility for errors. This documentation is provided to support Grafana Labs products and projects, which are subject to change with no prior notice.

Grafana Labs documentation versions

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 12:32:06 +0100

Grafana Labs documentation versions

Grafana Labs provides archived documentation for your convenience. To access archived docs, please use the selectors below.

Grafana Labs Helm charts

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 10:10:33 +0200

Grafana Labs Helm charts

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes, and Helm charts are a collection of files and resources (think deployments or Secrets) that help create, install, modify, and upgrade applications in Kubernetes. Helm charts include the templates that you need to apply to your clusters, which saves you from manually configuring your software.

Grafana Labs supports many Helm charts for Grafana Labs open source projects and Grafana Enterprise products. Revisit this page for links to additional Helm chart documentation that is under active development.

Grafana Labs Learning Hub

Fri, 15 May 2026 18:39:25 +0100

Grafana Labs Learning Hub

Welcome to Grafana Labs Learning.

Our self-paced courses span foundational to advanced concepts, helping you scale your observability practice with confidence. Recommended paths guide you through the Grafana platform and include interactive tutorials that can be completed in your Cloud instance. Learning paths offer expert-designed, flexible learning experiences, and can be taken individually or as part of a recommended path.

Built for everyone from hobbyists to large-scale administrators.

Start your learning journey today.

Grafana plugins documentation

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 08:20:52 +0000

Release life cycle for Grafana Labs

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 08:03:55 -0400

Release life cycle for Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs products, projects, and features can go through multiple release stages before becoming generally available. These stages in the release life cycle can present varying degrees of stability and support. The following are the Grafana Labs release stages:

Experimental
Private preview
Public preview
General availability (GA)

Quick reference table

Description	Experimental	Private preview	Public preview	General availability
Audience	Open source engineers and free cloud accounts	Invited customers	Early adopters and users who request access	Available to all customers
Risk	High (unknown) risk	Medium-high risk	Low-medium risk	Low (known) risk
Support	Not supported; OSS users can create issues in GitHub	Limited support from the Engineering team only	Support limited to enablement and configuration	Fully supported / on-call
Documentation	Code comments	Unofficial; communicated with participants	Limited; publicly available	Publicly available
Service-level agreement (SLA)	No	No	No	Yes

Experimental

Projects and features in the experimental stage are supported only by the Engineering teams; on-call support is not available. Documentation is either limited or not provided outside of code comments. No SLA is provided.

Experimental projects or features are primarily intended for open source engineers who want to participate in ensuring systems stability, and to gain consensus and approval for open source governance projects.

Experimental features might:

Cause considerable and destructive changes
Not be 100% backwards compatible
Be removed without notice

Projects and features in the experimental stage are not meant to be used in production or critical environments (such as a staging environment that’s critical to your workflow), and the risks are unknown/high.

Private preview

Features and products in private preview are supported by Project Managers and Engineers. Some on-call support might be available. Documentation is limited and privately communicated to participants. No SLA is provided.

Grafana invites a limited group of users to participate in private previews. Engineers actively work with users in order to gather feedback and make improvements.

Products and features in private preview are not meant to be used in production environments, and the risks are medium/high. Participants must sign the Grafana Labs Beta Product(s) Agreement.

Public preview

Features and products in public preview are supported by our Support teams, but might be limited to enablement, configuration, and some troubleshooting. Bugs and issues are escalated to Engineering teams. Some on-call support might be available. Documentation might be limited, but is publicly available. SLAs are not available.

Users interested in early adoption and users that have shown interest to Grafana representatives can request access to features in public preview.

Products and features in public preview are not meant to be used in production environments, and the risks are medium/low.

General Availability

Features and products in general availability are fully supported and covered by SLA. On-call support is available. Risks are known and considered low.

Features and products in the GA stage are available to the public and are considered safe for production environments.

Rolling release channels for Grafana Cloud

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:51:16 +0100

Rolling release channels for Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud, like most SaaS cloud products, releases and deploys software continuously. To ensure the quality of our deployments, we use rolling release channels (RRCs) with different update schedules. This model enables Grafana Labs to quickly respond and mitigate security vulnerabilities, and to ship features fast so they can reach a wide customer base. The main benefit of this model is that customers receive security fixes and new features without having to manually upgrade like you need to do if you choose our self-managed offering.

How Grafana Cloud updates work

Grafana Cloud consists of several components that update independently:

Grafana Backend and APIs : Core Grafana backend functionalities use rolling release channels (RRCs) for updates, with different update cadences as described below.
Grafana Frontend : The core Grafana UI (dashboards, navigation, etc.) updates continuously using a waves-based rollout strategy. All customers receive frontend updates daily on the same predictable schedule.
Hosted Databases : Cloud Metrics, Cloud Logs, Cloud Traces, and Cloud Profiles (based on Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope) update on their own independent schedules.
Cloud plugins and features : Plugins like data sources and features like Grafana SLO update independently on their own schedule.

What is a rolling release channel?

A rolling release channel is a release method where new features and updates “roll” through each release channel on a different cadence. Grafana Labs implements a schedule to update the rolling release channels. Instances are distributed among three channels with the following three update speeds:

Fast is updated daily during weekdays.
Steady is updated weekly.
Slow is updated monthly.

This schedule is subject to change due to circumstances like infrastructural incidents or critical bug fixes. In particular, we cannot guarantee that a given channel will be rolled out exactly on any given day.

Update strategy for Core Grafana UI

The Core Grafana UI receives daily updates that roll out gradually across production. Changes are deployed using a waves-based strategy where updates automatically progress through five production waves over approximately seven days after a change is merged. This ensures all customers receive bug fixes and improvements quickly and reliably, typically within 3-7 days depending on which production wave your instance is in.

Can I change my channel?

Customers on account tiers other than the Free Forever tier, who want to have early access to upcoming changes in Grafana, can move some or all of their non-production instances to the Fast channel.

Having a non-production instance on the Fast channel allows you to interact with new features and fixes in a safe place to familiarize yourself with them and determine their impact before they’re pushed to production. You can also choose to have production instances on any release cadence, based on how fast you would like to see changes in the production environment. You should evaluate how you want to balance faster delivery of changes and features with having a more gated approach and running your own tests.

The slower the channel selected for production, the more time features and fixes have to roll through the release channels which means they’re being used more. As a result, features and fixes become more resilient and stable due to being used by other customers, while also going through a series of tests that are performed to prove the stability of the release as they pass through to the next channel.

While we take great care in ensuring that known bugs and issues will not reach the Slow channel, it might still happen due to the nature of software development. In these cases, we will act as quickly as we can to fix the issue.

To change the rolling release channel for your instances, please contact Support by opening a ticket in the Grafana Cloud Portal. Free Forever accounts are not able to select a channel other than the one assigned.

Frequently asked questions

Where do I see what new features are available to me? What’s coming in Cloud can be found in What’s New Cloud
How do I know which channel my instance is in? Currently you can see the release channel you’re on in the page footer, but you cannot self-select a different one.
How do I ask to switch channels? If you’re an Enterprise or Advanced customer and want one or all of your instances to be on a different release channel, please contact Support. Free users are not able to change their channel.
If I report an issue, can that be classed as a “Critical bug”? Triage of issues belongs to engineering, and so does the classification. If the issue you reported is classified as a critical one, we will deal with it according to our internal Service Level Objectives.