Developer resources on Grafana Labs

Grafana MCP server

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:22:08 +0200

Grafana MCP server

This documentation helps you install the Grafana MCP server, connect MCP-compatible clients, and configure authentication, transports, and tools.

The Grafana MCP server is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI assistants and LLM clients access to your Grafana instance. You can query metrics and logs, search and manage dashboards, manage alert rules, work with Grafana Incident and Sift, and generate deeplinks to Grafana resources.

Overview

Use the Grafana MCP server to let your preferred MCP-compatible client (for example, Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code with Copilot) talk to Grafana. The server exposes tools for dashboards, datasources (Prometheus, Loki, and others), alerting, incidents, OnCall, and more. You configure which tools are enabled and how the server connects to Grafana (authentication and transport).

Quick start

This quick start requires uv. Add this to your MCP client configuration (for example Claude Desktop or Cursor):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "grafana": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["mcp-grafana"],
      "env": {
        "GRAFANA_URL": "http://localhost:3000",
        "GRAFANA_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN": "<your service account token>"
      }
    }
  }
}

For Grafana Cloud, set GRAFANA_URL to your instance URL (for example https://myinstance.grafana.net). Refer to Clients and Set up for next steps.

Grafana 9.0 or later is required for full functionality. Some features, particularly datasource-related operations, may not work correctly with earlier versions due to missing API endpoints.

Explore the docs

Clients – Cursor, Claude Desktop, VS Code, and more.
Set up – uvx, Docker, binary, Helm, and client configuration examples.
Configure – Authentication, command-line flags, transports, TLS, and tools.
Introduction – MCP concepts and RBAC overview.
Reference – MCP tools reference (tools, permissions, scopes, and RBAC guidance).
Guides – Query metrics and logs, dashboards, alerts, deeplinks, incidents.
Troubleshooting – Common issues including Grafana version compatibility.
Developer – Go SDK, observability, build and test.

License

The project is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Contribute to Grafana

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:49:47 +0000

Contribute to Grafana

This page lists resources for developers who want to contribute to the Grafana software ecosystem or build plugins for Grafana.

Communicate with Grafana

Use the right place to ask questions, report problems, and propose changes.

GitHub issues and pull requests: Use for reproducible bugs in core Grafana and maintained plugins, small and actionable feature requests, and code or docs changes via pull requests. Avoid general “how do I” questions. For security issues, follow the security policy.
Grafana community forums: Use for questions, troubleshooting, best practices, plugin development Q&A, and early idea discussion. Forums create a searchable public knowledge base that helps others with the same problems and questions. Start here if you are unsure: Grafana community forums.
Grafana Community Slack: Use for quick, time-sensitive chats and networking. Do not rely on Slack for long troubleshooting or decisions. Share outcomes back to a forum topic or GitHub issue/PR to keep a public record: Grafana Community Slack.

Note
Not sure where to start? Open a new topic in the forum! Maintainers and community members will redirect you if a GitHub issue or pull request is more appropriate.

Make technical contributions

Choose how you want to contribute to Grafana, from code to plugins to community support.

Contribute code to Grafana

Contributing to Grafana introduces the contribution process and community resources.
Developer guide shows how to set up your environment and run Grafana in development.
Architecture guides explain Grafana’s background architecture.
Create a pull request walks you through preparing a clear, descriptive pull request.
Browse all issues to find a good first task. You can also filter by help wanted.
Use the REST APIs to interact programmatically with the Grafana backend.

Develop a Plugin

Read the plugin development guide to choose a plugin type, scaffold your project, and develop locally.

Contribute without code

Report a bug with the bug report template and include steps to reproduce.
Submit a feature request to propose improvements.
Improve our docs with the documentation contribution guide.
Help with issue triage by reviewing, labeling, and clarifying open issues.
Report security vulnerabilities following our security policy.

Best practices and style

Our style guides outline Grafana style for frontend, backend, documentation, and more, including best practices. Please read through them before you start editing or coding!

Backend style guide explains how we want to write Go code in the future.
Documentation style guide applies to all documentation created for Grafana products.
End to end test framework provides guidance for Grafana e2e tests.
Frontend style guide provides rules and guidance on developing in React for Grafana.
Redux framework explains how Grafana handles Redux boilerplate code.
Styling Grafana expands on styling React components with Emotion.
Theming Grafana explains how to use themes and ThemeContext in Grafana code.

Developer tools

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:48:24 +0000

Developer tools in Grafana

Refer to the Grafana developer portal to access the following documentation:

Plugin development

You can develop your own Grafana plugin to enhance the features of Grafana, such as:

Panel plugins to visualize data
Data source plugins to connect to a new database or other source of data
App plugins to provide integrated out-of-the-box experiences

Refer to Grafana plugin tools for all the information.

Data structure in Grafana

Grafana supports a variety of different data sources, each with its own data model. To manage this, Grafana consolidates the query results from each of these data sources into one unified data structure called a data frame. Additionally, the data plane adds a property layer to the data frame with information about the data frame type and what the data frame holds.

Refer to the Grafana data structure documentation to learn more.

List of data sources that use the data plane

As of October 2025, the following data sources send data plane data in at least some of their responses:

Prometheus, including Amazon and Azure variants
Loki
Azure Monitor
Azure Data Explorer
BigQuery
ClickHouse
Cloudflare
Databricks
Influx
MySQL
New Relic
Oracle
Postgres
Snowflake
Victoria metrics

To see examples of data planes, refer to data plane example data in GitHub.

Grafana APIs

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:48:24 +0000

Grafana APIs

Refer to the following API reference guides:

Contribute to Grafana

Refer to the Contribute to Grafana guide to learn the various ways you can contribute to Grafana, and read the Grafana Labs Software Grant and Contributor License Agreement before making any contribution.

Developer tools

Learn about the development tools available in Grafana, as well as the Grafana data structure.

Grafana APIs

Read the API reference guides available in Grafana.