Troubleshooting on Grafana Labs

Troubleshoot dashboards

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

Troubleshoot dashboards

This page provides information to solve common dashboard problems.

Dashboard is slow

Are you trying to render dozens (or hundreds or thousands) of time-series on a graph? This can cause the browser to lag and feel sluggish. Try using functions like highestMax (in Graphite) to reduce the returned series.
Sometimes the series names can be very large. This causes larger response sizes. Try using alias to reduce the size of the returned series names.
Are you querying many time-series or for a long range of time? Both of these can cause Grafana or your data source to pull in a lot of data, which may slow it down.
It could be high load on your network infrastructure. If the slowness isn’t consistent, this may be the problem.

Dashboard refresh rate issues

By default, Grafana queries your data source every 30 seconds. Setting a low refresh rate on your dashboards puts unnecessary stress on the backend. In many cases, querying this frequently makes no sense, because the data isn’t being sent to the system such that changes would be seen.

We recommend the following:

Do not enable auto-refreshing on dashboards, panels, or variables unless you need it. Users can refresh their browser manually, or you can set the refresh rate for a time period that makes sense (every ten minutes, every hour, and so on).
If it is required, then set the refresh rate to once a minute. Again, users can always refresh the dashboard manually.
If your dashboard has a longer time period (such as a week), then you really don’t need automated refreshing.

Handling or rendering null data is wrong/confusing/weird

Some applications publish data intermittently; for example, they only post a metric when an event occurs. By default, Grafana graphs connect lines between the data points. This can be very deceiving.

In the picture below we have enabled:

Points and 3-point radius to highlight where data points are actually present.
Null value is set to connected.

In this graph, we set graph to show bars instead of lines and set the Null value to graph null as zero. There is a very big different in the visuals.

Enable diagnostics

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

Enable diagnostics

You can set up the grafana-server process to enable certain diagnostics when it starts. This can be helpful when investigating certain performance problems. It’s not recommended to have these enabled by default.

Turn on profiling

The grafana-server can be started with the arguments -profile to enable profiling, -profile-addr to override the default HTTP address (localhost), and -profile-port to override the default HTTP port (6060) where the pprof debugging endpoints are available. For example:

./grafana-server -profile -profile-addr=0.0.0.0 -profile-port=8080

Note that pprof debugging endpoints are served on a different port than the Grafana HTTP server.

You can configure or override profiling settings using environment variables:

export GF_DIAGNOSTICS_PROFILING_ENABLED=true
export GF_DIAGNOSTICS_PROFILING_ADDR=0.0.0.0
export GF_DIAGNOSTICS_PROFILING_PORT=8080

Refer to Go command pprof for more information about how to collect and analyze profiling data.

Use tracing

The grafana-server can be started with the arguments -tracing to enable tracing and -tracing-file to override the default trace file (trace.out) where trace result is written to. For example:

./grafana-server -tracing -tracing-file=/tmp/trace.out

You can configure or override profiling settings using environment variables:

export GF_DIAGNOSTICS_TRACING_ENABLED=true
export GF_DIAGNOSTICS_TRACING_FILE=/tmp/trace.out

View the trace in a web browser (Go required to be installed):

go tool trace <trace file>
2019/11/24 22:20:42 Parsing trace...
2019/11/24 22:20:42 Splitting trace...
2019/11/24 22:20:42 Opening browser. Trace viewer is listening on http://127.0.0.1:39735

For more information about how to analyze trace files, refer to Go command trace.

Troubleshoot queries

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

Troubleshoot queries

This page provides information to solve common dashboard problems.

I get different results when I rearrange my functions

Function order is very important. Just like in math, the order that you place your functions can affect the result.

Inspect your query request and response

The most common problems are related to the query and response from your data source. Even if it looks like a bug or visualization issue in Grafana, it is almost always a problem with the data source query or the data source response. Start by inspecting your panel query and response.

For more information, refer to Inspect request and response data.

My query is slow

How many data points is your query returning? A query that returns lots of data points will be slow. Try this:

In Query options, limit the Max data points returned.
In Query options, increase the Min interval time.
In your query, use a group by function.