Access Grafana Observability Data

Grafana MCP server

A [Model Context Protocol][mcp] (MCP) server for Grafana.

This provides access to your Grafana instance and the surrounding ecosystem.

Quick Start

Requires uv. Add the following to your MCP client configuration (e.g. Claude Desktop, 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, replace GRAFANA_URL with your instance URL (e.g. https://myinstance.grafana.net). See Usage for more installation options including Docker, binary, and Helm.

Requirements

• Grafana version 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.

Features

The following features are currently available in MCP server. This list is for informational purposes only and does not represent a roadmap or commitment to future features.

Dashboards

• Search for dashboards: Find dashboards by title, folder UID, tag, or starred status
• Get dashboard by UID: Retrieve full dashboard details using its unique identifier. Pass optional version to load a saved snapshot instead of the current dashboard. Warning: Large dashboards can consume significant context window space.
• List dashboard versions: List saved versions of a dashboard as compact metadata (version number, author, timestamp, save message)
• Get dashboard summary: Get a compact overview of a dashboard including title, panel count, panel types, variables, and metadata without the full JSON to minimize context window usage
• Get dashboard property: Extract specific parts of a dashboard using JSONPath expressions (e.g., $.title, $.panels[*].title) to fetch only needed data and reduce context window consumption
• Update or create a dashboard: Modify existing dashboards or create new ones. Warning: Requires full dashboard JSON which can consume large amounts of context window space.
• Patch dashboard: Apply specific changes to a dashboard without requiring the full JSON, significantly reducing context window usage for targeted modifications
• Get panel queries and datasource info: Get the title, query string, and datasource information (including UID and type, if available) from every panel in a dashboard

Run Panel Query

Note: Run panel query tools are disabled by default. To enable them, add runpanelquery to your --enabled-tools flag.

• Run panel query: Execute a dashboard panel's query with custom time ranges and variable overrides.

Context Window Management

The dashboard tools now include several strategies to manage context window usage effectively (issue #101):

• Use get_dashboard_summary for dashboard overview and planning modifications
• Use get_dashboard_property with JSONPath when you only need specific dashboard parts
• Avoid get_dashboard_by_uid unless you specifically need the complete dashboard JSON

Datasources

• List and fetch datasource information: View all configured datasources and retrieve detailed information about each.
  • Supported datasource types: Prometheus, Loki, ClickHouse, CloudWatch, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Snowflake, Athena.

Query Examples

Note: Query examples tools are disabled by default. To enable them, add examples to your --enabled-tools flag.

• Get query examples: Retrieve example queries for different datasource types to learn query syntax.

Prometheus Querying

• Query Prometheus: Execute PromQL queries (supports both instant and range metric queries) against Prometheus datasources.
• Query Prometheus metadata: Retrieve metric metadata, metric names, label names, and label values from Prometheus datasources.
• Query histogram percentiles: Calculate histogram percentile values (p50, p90, p95, p99) using histogram_quantile.

Loki Querying

• Query Loki logs and metrics: Run both log queries and metric queries using LogQL against Loki datasources.
• Query Loki metadata: Retrieve label names, label values, and stream statistics from Loki datasources.
• Query Loki patterns: Retrieve log patterns detected by Loki to identify common log structures and anomalies.

InfluxDB Querying

Note: InfluxDB tools are disabled by default. To enable them, add influxdb to your --enabled-tools flag.

• Query InfluxDB: Execute queries against InfluxDB datasources using either InfluxQL (v1.x) or Flux (v2.x). The dialect is inferred from the datasource configuration, or can be set explicitly via the dialect parameter.

SQL Datasource Querying

Note: SQL tools are disabled by default. To enable them, add sql to your --enabled-tools flag. Back-compat aliases clickhouse, snowflake, and athena also work.

Unified SQL tools support ClickHouse, Snowflake, Athena, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MSSQL through a single set of tools. Queries go through Grafana's datasource plugins, so authentication is handled by datasource configuration - credentials are never seen by the MCP server.

• List databases/schemas/catalogs: Discover organizational units for a SQL datasource. For Athena, omit catalog to list catalogs, or pass a catalog to list databases.
• List tables: List tables in a database or schema with metadata (row counts, sizes where available).
• Describe table schema: Get column names, types, nullability, defaults, and comments.
• Query SQL: Execute SQL queries with datasource-specific macro substitution ($__timeFilter(col), $__from/$__to, $__interval, ${varname}), automatic limit enforcement, and template variable support.

CloudWatch Querying

Note: CloudWatch tools are disabled by default. To enable them, add cloudwatch to your --enabled-tools flag.

• List CloudWatch namespaces: Discover available AWS CloudWatch namespaces.
• List CloudWatch metrics: List metrics available in a specific namespace.
• List CloudWatch dimensions: Get dimensions for filtering metric queries.
• Query CloudWatch: Execute CloudWatch metric queries with time range support.

Google Cloud Logging Querying

Note: Google Cloud Logging tools are disabled by default. To enable them, add cloudlogging to your --enabled-tools flag. Requires the Google Cloud Logging datasource plugin (googlecloud-logging-datasource) version 1.8.0 or later, which needs Grafana 11.2+. Older plugin versions return a different response layout and query_cloud_logging reports an error asking for an upgrade.

• List Cloud Logging projects: Discover the GCP project IDs the datasource can read logs from.
• List Cloud Logging buckets and views: Discover log buckets and log views to scope a query.
• Query Cloud Logging: Run Cloud Logging query language filters (e.g. resource.type="k8s_container" AND severity>=ERROR) with time range and limit; returns entries newest-first with severity, body, labels, and trace ID. GCP authentication is handled by the datasource configuration.

Graphite Querying

Note: Graphite tools are disabled by default. To enable them, add graphite to your --enabled-tools flag.

• Query Graphite: Execute Graphite render API queries against a Graphite datasource.
• List Graphite metrics: Browse and discover Graphite metric paths.
• List Graphite tags: List available Graphite tags and tag values.
• Query Graphite density: Query Graphite metric density for a given pattern.

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch Querying

Note: Elasticsearch/OpenSearch tools are disabled by default. To enable them, add elasticsearch to your --enabled-tools flag.

• Query Elasticsearch/OpenSearch: Execute search queries against Elasticsearch or OpenSearch datasources using either Lucene query syntax or Elasticsearch Query DSL. Supports filtering by time range and retrieving logs, metrics, or any indexed data. Returns documents with their index, ID, source fields, and optional relevance score.

Quickwit Querying

Note: Quickwit tools are disabled by default. To enable them, add quickwit to your --enabled-tools flag.

• Query Quickwit: Execute search queries against Quickwit datasources using Lucene query syntax or partial Elasticsearch-compatible Query DSL. Supports filtering by time range and retrieving logs or other indexed documents. Returns documents with their index, ID, source fields, and optional relevance score.

Agent Observability

Note: Agent Observability tools are disabled by default and work only in Grafana Cloud. To enable them, add agento11y to your --enabled-tools flag.

• List and search conversations: List recent LLM conversations or search them with a filter expression (model, provider, agent, status, error type, eval results, and more) over a time range. Search results include error counts, rating summaries, evaluation summaries, and trace IDs.
• Get conversation detail: Fetch a single conversation with all its generations, including prompts and outputs.
• Get generation detail and scores: Fetch a single generation by ID, and its evaluation scores (evaluator, score key, value, passed, explanation).
• Read the agent catalog: List the agents that send telemetry, fetch one agent version in full (complete system prompt, every tool with its JSON schema, and the models it ran on), walk an agent's version history, and compare evaluation score aggregates per version. Effective versions are sha256: hashes that a tool change never affects; for an agent that reports no version of its own they hash the system prompt, so a prompt edit mints a new version. Catalog and version rows carry a token_estimate, which is worth checking before fetching a full prompt.
• Inspect evaluators and templates: Read the evaluators a score came from, the templates they were derived from, and the judge providers and models available to LLM-judge evaluators. With write tools enabled, also create, fork, test, and delete evaluators.
• Inspect eval rules and guards: Read the asynchronous eval rules that bind evaluators to production traffic, and the guards (hook rules) that run inline and can warn or deny. With write tools enabled, also create, update, preview, and delete them. Writes and the non-persisting preview_rule and test_evaluator operations need the grafana-agento11y-app.eval:write permission, granted by the Agento11y Admin role.
• Curate saved conversations and collections: Read the saved conversations (bookmarks that give a conversation a stable ID, name, and tags) and the collections that group them, including each collection's member count and the collections embedded in every saved-conversation row. With write tools enabled, also bookmark a conversation, create and edit collections, and add or remove members. These writes need the same grafana-agento11y-app.eval:write permission.
• Read and edit test suites: List the versioned test suites that offline experiments run against, read one with its full version history, and page through the test cases of a version. With write tools enabled, also create a suite, rename or retag it, open a draft version, publish it, and write or delete its test cases. A published version is frozen, so an edit means opening a new draft. These writes need grafana-agento11y-app.eval:write.
• Read offline experiments: List the evaluation runs over a test suite and read one with its headline pass rate, cost, and token totals. Drill down through a per-test-case report to trials, their scores with each judge's explanation, and their artifact metadata. With write tools enabled, also rename or retag an experiment and cancel a running one, which need grafana-agento11y-app.eval:write. Experiments are created by SDK runners, not by this tool.

Grafana Assistant

Note: Assistant tools are disabled by default and require the Grafana Assistant plugin (grafana-assistant-app) to be installed on the target Grafana instance. They are also write tools (the assistant may mutate stack state), so they are skipped when --disable-write is set. To enable them, add assistant to your --enabled-tools flag.

• Ask the assistant: Send a natural-language prompt to Grafana Assistant and wait for the full text reply. The assistant may use tools, metrics, logs, and other stack context-broader than firing one isolated data-source query. Pass the returned contextId back in a follow-up call to continue the same conversation. Complex tasks can take several minutes; the call blocks until the reply is done or the request times out (5 minutes).

Incidents

• Search, create, and update incidents: Manage incidents in Grafana Incident, including searching, creating, adding activities, and reading or setting custom fields.

Alerting

• List and fetch alert rule information: View alert rules and their statuses (firing/normal/error/etc.) in Grafana. Supports both Grafana-managed rules and datasource-managed rules from Prometheus or Loki datasources.
• Create and update alert rules: Create new alert rules or modify existing ones.
• Delete alert rules: Remove alert rules by UID.
• Manage alerting routing: View notification policies, contact points, and time intervals. Supports both Grafana-managed contact points and receivers from external Alertmanager datasources (Prometheus Alertmanager, Mimir, Cortex).

Grafana OnCall

• List and manage schedules: View and manage on-call schedules in Grafana OnCall.
• Get shift details: Retrieve detailed information about specific on-call shifts.
• Get current on-call users: See which users are currently on call for a schedule.
• List teams and users: View all OnCall teams and users.
• List alert groups: View and filter alert groups from Grafana OnCall by various criteria including state, integration, labels, and time range.
• Get alert group details: Retrieve detailed information about a specific alert group by its ID.

Admin

Note: Admin tools are disabled by default. To enable them, include admin in your --enabled-tools flag.

• List teams: View all configured teams in Grafana.
• List Users: View all users in an organization in Grafana.
• List all roles: List all Grafana roles, with an optional filter for delegatable roles.
• Get role details: Get details for a specific Grafana role by UID.
• List assignments for a role: List all users, teams, and service accounts assigned to a role.
• List roles for users: List all roles assigned to one or more users.
• List roles for teams: List all roles assigned to one or more teams.
• List permissions for a resource: List all permissions defined for a specific resource (dashboard, datasource, folder, etc.).
• Describe a Grafana resource: List available permissions and assignment capabilities for a resource type.

User

• User info: Get the current Grafana identity - login, email, name, whether it is a Grafana (server) admin, the current organization, and the organizations the credential can access (with roles). Use it to discover valid orgId values for multi-organization requests.

Navigation

• Generate deeplinks: Create accurate deeplink URLs for Grafana resources instead of relying on LLM URL guessing.
  • Dashboard links: Generate direct links to dashboards using their UID (e.g., http://localhost:3000/d/dashboard-uid)
  • Panel links: Create links to specific panels within dashboards with viewPanel parameter (e.g., http://localhost:3000/d/dashboard-uid?viewPanel=5)
  • Explore links: Generate links to Grafana Explore with pre-configured datasources (e.g., http://localhost:3000/explore?schemaVersion=1&panes={"a":{"datasource":"prometheus-uid"}}). Grafana below 10.2 does not understand panes, so the legacy ?left={...} format is emitted for those versions instead.
  • Time range support: Add time range parameters to links (from=now-1h&to=now)
  • Custom parameters: Include additional query parameters like dashboard variables or refresh intervals

Annotations

• Get Annotations: Query annotations with filters. Supports time range, dashboard UID, tags, and match mode.
• Create Annotation: Create a new annotation on a dashboard or panel.
• Create Graphite Annotation: Create annotations using Graphite format (what, when, tags, data).
• Update Annotation: Replace all fields of an existing annotation (full update).
• Patch Annotation: Update only specific fields of an annotation (partial update).
• Delete Annotation: Permanently delete an annotation by ID.
• Get Annotation Tags: List available annotation tags with optional filtering.

Snapshots

• List snapshots: List dashboard snapshots with optional query and limit filters.
• Get snapshot: Retrieve snapshot metadata and dashboard payload by snapshot key.
• Create snapshot: Create a dashboard snapshot from a full dashboard payload, with optional expiration and external snapshot options.
• Delete snapshot: Delete a snapshot by snapshot key.

Rendering

• Get panel or dashboard image: Render a Grafana dashboard panel or full dashboard as a PNG image. Returns the image as base64 encoded data for use in reports, alerts, or presentations. Supports customizing dimensions, time range, theme, scale, and dashboard variables. Also supports rendering not-yet-applied dashboards from a provisioning repository branch (e.g. a git-sync PR preview) via the optional provisioningPreview parameter.
  • Note: Requires the Grafana Image Renderer service to be installed and configured.

Provisioning

• List provisioning repositories: List provisioning repositories configured for this Grafana instance (e.g. git-sync sources), returning each repository's slug along with its source URL, branch, path, sync state, and health.
• Validate provisioning file: Dry-run-apply a file from a provisioning repository at a given branch or commit. Returns whether it would be accepted, the resource action (create/update), the target resource type, and any structured validation errors - the same admission surface Grafana's PR commenter uses.

The list of tools is configurable, so you can choose which tools you want to make available to the MCP client. This is useful if you don't use certain functionality or if you don't want to take up too much of the context window. To disable a category of tools, use the --disable-<category> flag when starting the server. For example, to disable the OnCall tools, use --disable-oncall, or to disable navigation deeplink generation, use --disable-navigation.

RBAC Permissions

Each tool requires specific RBAC permissions to function properly. When creating a service account for the MCP server, ensure it has the necessary permissions based on which tools you plan to use. The permissions listed are the minimum required actions - you may also need appropriate scopes (e.g., datasources:*, dashboards:*, folders:*) depending on your use case.

Tip: If you're not familiar with Grafana RBAC or you want a quicker, simpler setup instead of configuring many granular scopes, you can assign a built-in role such as Editor to the service account. The Editor role grants broad read/write access that will allow most MCP server operations; it is less granular (and therefore less restrictive) than manually-applied scopes, so use it only when convenience is more important than strict least-privilege access.

Note: OnCall and other plugin-backed tools are authorized by plugin actions such as grafana-irm-app.schedules:read. The basic Viewer role includes the read actions and Editor the write actions. Incident tools need only plugins.app:access; IRM authorizes incident actions by basic role.

Actions in group/resource:verb form, such as dashboard.grafana.app/dashboards:get, apply only to on-behalf-of access tokens. A service account needs only the other actions listed.

For more information about Grafana RBAC, see the official documentation.

RBAC Scopes

Scopes define the specific resources that permissions apply to. Each action requires both the appropriate permission and scope combination.

Common Scope Patterns:

• Broad access: Use * wildcards for organization-wide access

  • datasources:* - Access to all datasources
  • dashboards:* - Access to all dashboards
  • folders:* - Access to all folders
  • teams:* - Access to all teams

• Limited access: Use specific UIDs or IDs to restrict access to individual resources

  • datasources:uid:prometheus-uid - Access only to a specific Prometheus datasource
  • dashboards:uid:abc123 - Access only to dashboard with UID abc123
  • folders:uid:xyz789 - Access only to folder with UID xyz789
  • teams:id:5 - Access only to team with ID 5
  • global.users:id:123 - Access only to user with ID 123

Examples:

• Full MCP server access: Grant broad permissions for all tools

  datasources:* (datasources:read, datasources:query)
  dashboards:* (dashboards:read, dashboards:create, dashboards:write)
  folders:* (for dashboard creation and alert rules)
  teams:* (teams:read)
  global.users:* (users:read)
  

• Limited datasource access: Only query specific Prometheus and Loki instances

  datasources:uid:prometheus-prod (datasources:query)
  datasources:uid:loki-prod (datasources:query)
  

• Dashboard-specific access: Read only specific dashboards

  dashboards:uid:monitoring-dashboard (dashboards:read)
  dashboards:uid:alerts-dashboard (dashboards:read)
  

Tools