Grafana Dashboards¶

Connect HolmesGPT to Grafana for dashboard analysis, query extraction, and understanding your monitoring setup. This integration enables investigation of dashboard configurations and extraction of Prometheus queries for deeper analysis.

Prerequisites¶

A Grafana service account token with the following permissions:

Basic role → Viewer

Configuration¶

Holmes CLIRobusta Helm Chart

Add the following to ~/.holmes/config.yaml. Create the file if it doesn't exist:

toolsets:
  grafana/dashboards:
    enabled: true
    config:
      api_key: <your grafana service account token>
      api_url: <your grafana url>  # e.g. https://acme-corp.grafana.net or http://localhost:3000
      # Optional: Additional headers for all requests
      # additional_headers:
      #   X-Custom-Header: "custom-value"

After making changes to your configuration, run:

holmes toolset refresh

To test, run:

holmes ask "Show me all dashboards tagged with 'kubernetes'"

holmes:
  toolsets:
    grafana/dashboards:
      enabled: true
      config:
        api_key: <your grafana API key>
        api_url: <your grafana url>  # e.g. https://acme-corp.grafana.net
        # Optional: Additional headers for all requests
        # additional_headers:
        #   X-Custom-Header: "custom-value"

Capabilities¶

Tool Name	Description
grafana_search_dashboards	Search for dashboards and folders by query, tags, UIDs, or folder locations
grafana_get_dashboard_by_uid	Retrieve complete dashboard JSON including all panels and queries
grafana_get_home_dashboard	Get the home dashboard configuration
grafana_get_dashboard_tags	List all tags used across dashboards for categorization

Advanced Configuration¶

SSL Verification¶

For self-signed certificates, you can disable SSL verification:

toolsets:
  grafana/dashboards:
    enabled: true
    config:
      api_url: https://grafana.internal
      api_key: <your api key>
      verify_ssl: false  # Disable SSL verification (default: true)

External URL¶

If HolmesGPT accesses Grafana through an internal URL but you want clickable links in results to use a different URL:

toolsets:
  grafana/dashboards:
    enabled: true
    config:
      api_url: http://grafana.internal:3000  # Internal URL for API calls
      external_url: https://grafana.example.com  # URL for links in results
      api_key: <your api key>

How it Works¶

Dashboard Query Extraction¶

When HolmesGPT retrieves a dashboard, it can extract and analyze Prometheus queries from dashboard panels. This is particularly useful for:

Understanding what metrics a dashboard monitors
Extracting queries for further investigation with the Prometheus toolset
Analyzing dashboard time ranges and variable usage

Example Usage¶

Finding dashboards by tag:

holmes ask "Find all dashboards tagged with 'production' or 'kubernetes'"

Analyzing a specific dashboard:

holmes ask "Show me what metrics the 'Node Exporter' dashboard monitors"

Extracting queries for investigation:

holmes ask "Get the CPU usage queries from the Kubernetes cluster dashboard and check if any nodes are throttling"