Grafana

Grafana

· #235 most-used

Every metric in one place — your agent on alert

DatabaseAnalyticsDeveloperSecurityAutomation

Grafana is the open-source observability platform used by teams to visualise, correlate, and alert on metrics, logs, and traces from any data source. Connect it to Actionist and your agents can create dashboards for new services, update SLO thresholds, manage team access, and react to alert state changes — all without you touching the Grafana UI. Whether you run Grafana Cloud or a self-hosted stack, your agent becomes the operator that keeps your observability workspace clean, current, and correctly permissioned.

Average time saved
10 hours
per person · per month
≈ 1 workdays back

Eliminates manual work. Grafana automation eliminates manual dashboard creation at deploy time, weekly copy-paste of metrics into reports, and the back-and-forth of adding and removing team members from permission groups.

Schedule

What your Grafana agent runs on autopilot

A week of scheduled jobs your Actionist agent will execute on your behalf.

28Scheduled jobs
7Agents at work
24/7Always on
Agents
WedFri
Wed
Thu
Fri
7a
8a
9a
10a
11a
12p
1p
2p
3p
4p
5p
6p
Multi-app workflows

Grafana × every other app you use

End-to-end automations that span multiple apps — each one a real business outcome.

6Workflows
9Apps spanned
~24 hrsSaved / week
6Personas served
For customer success
Featured4 apps

Alert-to-customer incident briefing

When a customer emails about degraded performance, the agent pulls the relevant Grafana dashboards, reads current error rates and latency percentiles, creates a dedicated incident dashboard scoped to that customer's traffic, and fires an update to the customer-facing Slack channel — all before a CSM has opened their laptop. The response time drops from 25 minutes to under 90 seconds, and customers receive a data-backed acknowledgment rather than a holding message.

~4 hrs

Time saved for your team — every week, on autopilot

The flow
Trigger·When a customer email reports service degradation
Result
Create a scoped incident dashboard for this customerPost data-backed incident update to #customer-incidentsBlock 30-min sync for CSM and engineering lead
The win
Saved per run
25 min
Runs / week
~10×
Customers get data-backed updates in seconds
Driven byCustomer Support Agent
ROI

Savings

What your team gets back — two angles: what you stop doing manually, and what that's worth.

Without Actionist

What you do manually today

With Actionist

What your agent runs for you

  • Sales
    18 min / week
    Manual uptime screenshot

    A sales engineer screenshots Grafana panels and pastes numbers into a slide deck before every reliability-focused discovery call.

    Sales Agent
    0 min
    Agent builds the reliability deck

    The agent reads the SLA dashboards and compiles a formatted Google Sheet with 30-day uptime and p99 latency figures, ready in two minutes.

  • Marketing
    13 min / week
    Manual usage data export

    A growth analyst emails engineering for feature adoption figures, waits for a Grafana screenshot, then re-enters the numbers into a campaign brief.

    Marketing Agent
    0 min
    Agent extracts adoption metrics

    The agent reads product usage dashboards and writes structured adoption data directly into the campaign brief document, no engineering ping required.

  • Customer Support
    18 min / week
    Alert context gathering

    A support engineer opens Grafana, finds the relevant dashboard, reads the error rate, and pastes a screenshot into the incident thread — taking 20 minutes per escalation.

    Customer Support Agent
    0 min
    Agent posts metric context instantly

    The agent fetches the relevant dashboard on alert, extracts current metric values, and posts a formatted incident thread update before the support engineer has refreshed their inbox.

  • Human Resources
    7 min / week
    Manual access provisioning

    An HR coordinator files an IT ticket to add a new hire to the correct Grafana teams; access sometimes takes three to five business days to land.

    Human Resources Agent
    0 min
    Agent provisions team access

    The agent adds the new hire to the correct Grafana teams the moment their onboarding record is confirmed, with a full audit log written automatically.

  • Finance
    13 min / week
    Cloud cost metrics copy-paste

    A finance analyst manually reads infrastructure cost dashboards in Grafana and re-enters the figures into the monthly cost report spreadsheet.

    Finance Agent
    0 min
    Agent compiles cost dashboard

    The agent reads the cost dashboards and creates a month-over-month cost vs. load visualisation, then writes the key figures directly to the finance tracker.

  • Operations
    25 min / week
    Weekly reliability rollup

    An engineering lead spends 60 minutes every Monday reading golden-signal dashboards and manually compiling service health numbers into a Notion report.

    Operations Agent
    0 min
    Agent publishes the report

    The agent reads all production dashboards, extracts error rate, latency, and saturation values, and publishes a Notion reliability page before the team standup.

  • Legal
    6 min / week
    Access revocation follow-up

    A legal operations manager has to manually follow up with IT to confirm a departing contractor's Grafana access was revoked, often a week after their last day.

    Legal Agent
    0 min
    Agent removes access immediately

    The agent removes the contractor from all Grafana teams the moment their offboarding record is updated, posting a timestamped confirmation to the legal audit log.

+ 100s of other Grafana automations
Average monthly
10 hrs / person / month
Average monthly
10 hrs / person / month
Calculator

Calculate what your team saves

Team size
10 person
Hourly rate
$20 / hr
Hours saved / week
25
Hours saved / year
1,250
Annual ROI
$25,000

Based on Grafana's typical team usage — the visible tasks plus a few other automations the agent runs: ~2.5 hrs / person / week of admin work automated.

Connect

How to plug Grafana into Actionist

Pick the connection method that suits your environment.

The fastest path to Grafana. Install the official Grafana MCP server and your agent manages dashboards, teams, alerts, and users through a secure OAuth handshake — no API tokens to rotate, no base URLs to configure.

1
Open the Apps tab

Find Grafana in the Apps library and click Connect. MCP is selected by default.

2
Authorise in Grafana

Actionist opens the Grafana OAuth consent screen. Choose the organisation you want to connect and grant the requested scopes (dashboards, alerting, teams, users). Grafana Cloud and self-hosted instances are both supported.

3
Test the connection

Actionist runs a read-only call to verify the handshake. You're ready.

Actions

16 actions your agent can call

Read and write operations available to your Actionist agent.

Triggers

6 events your agent can react to

Events your agent watches for, and the actions it kicks off in response.

Skills

Skills that pair with Grafana

Reusable agent skills that work well alongside this app.

Monitoring

Configures observability for your apps and infrastructure — metrics, logs, traces, and alert rules — using Grafana as the visualisation layer.

Architecture Designer

Designs system architecture and produces ADRs; uses Grafana dashboards to validate performance assumptions and track capacity against design targets.

Openclaw Command Center

Real-time session and cost intelligence dashboard for Openclaw agents, surfacing LLM usage and system vitals in a single Grafana-backed view.

MCP servers

MCP servers that work with Grafana

Connect Actionist to MCP servers built for or around this app.

grafana
Official

Official MCP server for Grafana — manages dashboards, users, teams, alerts, and data sources via the Grafana HTTP API.

grafana/mcp-grafana
Official

Grafana-maintained MCP server giving agents access to dashboards, data source queries, and observability data directly from a Grafana instance.

tumf/grafana-loki-mcp

MCP server for querying Grafana Loki log streams — use when you want the agent to read log data alongside metrics.

FAQs

Questions about Grafana + Actionist

How do I connect Grafana to Actionist?
The fastest route is MCP. Open the Apps tab, find Grafana, click Connect, and authorise Actionist via the Grafana OAuth screen — choose your organisation and grant the alerting, dashboard, team, and user scopes. If you run a self-hosted Grafana instance without OAuth, use the API Key method instead: create a service account token with Editor role under Administration → Service Accounts, paste it into Actionist, and add your Grafana base URL. The connection test runs a read-only dashboard list call to confirm the handshake before you proceed.
What permissions does the agent need in Grafana?
Read-only tasks (listing dashboards, retrieving team rosters, auditing users) need the Viewer role. Creating, updating, or deleting dashboards and managing team membership requires the Editor role. Deleting users from the organisation or changing another user's role requires the Admin role. Scope the service account token or OAuth grant to the minimum role that covers your workflows — if you only want the agent to build and read dashboards, Editor is sufficient. You can always revoke and re-grant scopes from Grafana's Administration section.
Can the agent react to Grafana alerts without polling?
Yes — use the Alert firing and Alert resolved triggers. Grafana Alerting sends a webhook when an alert state changes; Actionist picks it up and routes your agent immediately. No polling, no delay. You configure the webhook URL in Grafana under Alerting → Contact Points: add a new Webhook contact point and paste the Actionist webhook URL shown in the trigger setup screen. For fine-grained control over all state transitions (Normal → Pending → Firing → No Data), use the Alert state changed trigger instead.
What can the agent do with Grafana dashboards?
The agent can create dashboards from scratch, retrieve a single dashboard's full JSON model, list all dashboards in the organisation (filterable by folder or tag), update an existing dashboard's panels and variables, and delete dashboards that are stale or retired. Common automated tasks include spinning up an incident dashboard when an alert fires, updating SLO threshold annotations when targets change, and exporting dashboard JSON to an S3 bucket as a version backup whenever a dashboard is saved.
How do I avoid duplicate dashboards when the agent creates them automatically?
Before calling Create a dashboard, have the agent call Get all dashboards and search the results for a matching title or UID. If one is found, route to Update a dashboard instead. Build this check into your workflow's conditional branch: the agent reads existing dashboards, checks for a title match, and writes only if no match is found. For incident dashboards you want recreated fresh each time, use a naming convention that includes a timestamp or incident ID so they never collide with permanent dashboards.
Can the agent manage team access across a large Grafana organisation?
Yes — use Retrieve all teams to list every team in the org, Get a team to inspect specific team metadata, Add a member to a team and Remove a member from a team for roster changes, and Delete a team when a squad is disbanded. For bulk onboarding, the agent reads team names from a spreadsheet, calls Retrieve all teams to match IDs, then adds each new hire to the right groups. For offboarding, the agent iterates all teams and removes the departing user from any it finds them in — no manual admin login required.
Does the agent support Grafana Cloud and self-hosted Grafana equally?
Both are supported. For Grafana Cloud, use the MCP connection with OAuth — no base URL needed, the handshake resolves your stack automatically. For self-hosted Grafana (including on-premises OSS and Enterprise), use the API Key connection method with your instance's hostname as the base URL (e.g. https://grafana.yourcompany.com). The same set of actions (dashboards, teams, users) works identically across both deployment models, as they share the same HTTP API surface.
What happens if the agent's Grafana API token expires mid-workflow?
Grafana API tokens do not expire by default, but service account tokens can be set with an expiry date. If a token expires, the agent's API calls return a 401 and the workflow step fails with a clear authentication error. To prevent this, either use MCP (OAuth tokens are refreshed automatically) or create a service account token with no expiry for long-lived automation. If you set an expiry, add a scheduled workflow that alerts you 7 days before the expiry date so you rotate the token before workflows break.