Usage insights on Grafana Labs

Dashboard and data source insights

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:26:57 +0000

Dashboard and data source insights

For every dashboard and data source, you can access usage information.

Dashboard insights

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise v7.0+.

To see dashboard usage information, go to the top bar and click Dashboard insights.

Dashboard insights show the following information:

Stats: The number of daily queries and errors for the past 30 days.
Users & activity: The daily view count for the last 30 days; last activities on the dashboard and recent users (with a limit of 20).

Data source insights

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise v7.3+.

Data source insights give you information about how a data source has been used in the past 30 days, such as:

Queries per day
Errors per day
Query load time per day (averaged in ms)

To find data source insights:

Go to the Data source list view.
Click on a data source.
Click the Insights tab.

Presence indicator

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:26:57 +0000

Presence indicator

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise v7.0+.

When you are signed in and looking at any given dashboard, you can know who is looking at the same dashboard as you are via a presence indicator, which displays avatars of users who have interacted with the dashboard recently. The default time frame is within the past 10 minutes. To see the user’s name, hover over the user’s avatar. The avatars come from Gravatar based on the user’s email.

When there are more active users on a dashboard than can fit within the presence indicator, click the +X icon. Doing so opens dashboard insights, which contains more details about recent user activity.

To change recent to something other than the past 10 minutes, edit the configuration file:

[analytics.views]
# Set age for recent active users
recent_users_age = 10m

Sort dashboards by using insights data

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:26:57 +0000

Sort dashboards by using insights data

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise v7.0+.

In the search view, you can sort dashboards by using insights data. Doing so helps you find unused or broken dashboards or discover those that are most viewed.

There are several sort options:

Errors total
Errors 30 days
Views total
Views 30 days

Export logs of usage insights

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:26:57 +0000

Export logs of usage insights

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise v7.4+.

By exporting usage logs to Loki, you can directly query them and create dashboards of the information that matters to you most, such as dashboard errors, most active organizations, or your top-10 most-used queries.

Usage insights logs

Usage insights logs are JSON objects that represent certain user activities, such as:

A user opens a dashboard.
A query is sent to a data source.

Scope

A log is created every time a user opens a dashboard or when a query is sent to a data source in the dashboard view. A query that is performed via Explore does not generate a log.

Format

Logs of usage insights contain the following fields, where the fields followed by * are always available, and the others depend on the logged event:

Field name	Type	Description
`eventName`*	string	Type of the event, which can be either `data-request` or `dashboard-view`.
`folderName`*	string	Name of the dashboard folder.
`dashboardName`*	string	Name of the dashboard where the event happened.
`dashboardId`*	number	ID of the dashboard where the event happened.
`datasourceName`	string	Name of the data source that was queried.
`datasourceType`	string	Type of the data source that was queried. For example, `prometheus`, `elasticsearch`, or `loki`.
`datasourceId`	number	ID of the data source that was queried.
`panelId`	number	ID of the panel of the query.
`panelName`	string	Name of the panel of the query.
`error`	string	Error returned by the query.
`duration`	number	Duration of the query.
`orgId`*	number	ID of the user’s organization.
`orgName`*	string	Name of the user’s organization.
`timestamp`*	string	The date and time that the request was made, in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in RFC3339 format.
`tokenId`*	number	ID of the user’s authentication token.
`username`*	string	Name of the Grafana user that made the request.
`userId`*	number	ID of the Grafana user that made the request.

Configuration

To export your logs, enable the usage insights feature and configure an export location in the configuration file:

[usage_insights.export]
# Enable the usage insights export feature
enabled = true
# Storage type
storage = loki

The options for storage type are loki and logger (added in Grafana Enterprise 8.2).

If the storage type is set to loki you’ll need to also configure Grafana to export to a Loki ingestion server. To do this, you’ll need Loki installed. Refer to Install Loki for instructions on how to install Loki.

[usage_insights.export.storage.loki]
# Set the communication protocol to use with Loki (can be grpc or http)
type = grpc
# Set the address for writing logs to Loki (format must be host:port)
url = localhost:9095
# Defaults to true. If true, it establishes a secure connection to Loki
tls = true

Using logger will print usage insights to your Grafana server log. There is no option for configuring the logger storage type.

Visualize Loki usage insights in Grafana

If you export logs into Loki, you can build Grafana dashboards to understand your Grafana instance usage.

Add Loki as a data source. Refer to Grafana fundamentals tutorial.
Import one of the following dashboards:
- Usage insights
- Usage insights datasource details
Play with usage insights to understand them:
- In Explore, you can use the query {datasource="gdev-loki",kind="usage_insights"} to retrieve all logs related to your gdev-loki data source.
- In a dashboard, you can build a table panel with the query topk(10, sum by (error) (count_over_time({kind="usage_insights", datasource="gdev-prometheus"} | json | error != "" [$__interval]))) to display the 10 most common errors your users see using the gdev-prometheus data source.
- In a dashboard, you can build a graph panel with the queries sum by(host) (count_over_time({kind="usage_insights"} | json | eventName="data-request" | error != "" [$__interval])) and sum by(host) (count_over_time({kind="usage_insights"} | json | eventName="data-request" | error = "" [$__interval])) to show the evolution of the data request count over time. Using by (host) allows you to have more information for each Grafana server you have if you have set up Grafana for high availability.