Grafana Has a Free API — Here's How to Build Custom Dashboards Programmatically

Why Grafana's API? Grafana is the go-to open-source platform for monitoring and observability. But most developers only use the UI. The Grafana HTTP API lets you automate everything: create dashboards, manage alerts, provision data sources — all programmatically. Grafana Cloud free tier: 10K metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces. More than enough to get started. Getting Started 1. Get Your API Key Grafana Cloud (free): Sign up at grafana.com, go to Configuration → API Keys → Add API key . Self-hosted: Same path in your Grafana instance. export GRAFANA_URL = "https://your-instance.grafana.net" export GRAFANA_API_KEY = "your-api-key" 2. List All Dashboards curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_API_KEY " \ " $GRAFANA_URL /api/search?type=dash-db" | jq '.[].title' 3. Create a Dashboard via API import requests GRAFANA_URL = " https://your-instance.grafana.net " HEADERS = { " Authorization " : " Bearer YOUR_API_KEY " , " Content-Type " : " application/json " } dashboard = { " dashboard " : {