Documentation Grafana documentation Administration Grafana Advisor

Grafana Advisor

Overview

Grafana Advisor is a monitoring tool that helps administrators keep their Grafana instances running smoothly and securely. It automatically performs regular health checks on your Grafana server, providing actionable insights and recommendations for maintaining optimal system performance.

Before you begin

To set up Grafana Advisor you need:

• Administration rights in your Grafana organization.
• If you’re running Grafana on-premise, enable the required feature toggle in your Grafana instance. Refer to Enable required feature toggles for instructions. This is not required if you’re using Grafana Cloud, as the feature toggles are enabled by default.

Enable feature toggles

To activate Grafana Advisor, you need to enable the grafanaAdvisor feature toggle. This will automatically install the Grafana Advisor application to your server if it’s not already installed. For additional information about feature toggles, refer to Configure feature toggles.

To enable the required feature toggles, add them to your Grafana configuration file:

1. Open your Grafana configuration file, either grafana.ini or custom.ini. For file location based on the operating system, refer to Configuration file location.

2. Locate or add a [feature_toggles] section. Add this value:

   ini Copy

   [feature_toggles]
   grafanaAdvisor = true

3. Save the changes to the file and restart Grafana.

Access Grafana Advisor

1. Log in to your Grafana instance with an administrator account
2. Navigate to the Administration section
3. Select “Advisor” from the navigation menu

Understand the Advisor interface

Action needed section

This collapsible section displays issues requiring immediate attention:

• For each item, Grafana Advisor displays the specific name of the item that needs to be fixed.
• For data source issues, Grafana Advisor displays the specific data source name.
• One or more buttons appear. These buttons point you to different links to fix the issue, retry the check or hide the error.

Investigation needed section

This collapsible section provides information on issues that may not require immediate action but require your attention. For example, it provides information on plugins that require an upgrade. Similar to the “Action needed” section, clicking an item opens the plugin’s upgrade page. From there, you can either update to the latest version or select a specific version from the version history tab.

More info section

This collapsible section provides more details about which checks have been performed and how many items have been analyzed.

Address issues

To resolve issues flagged by Grafana Advisor and maintain system reliability, follow the best practices below. Regularly check the Advisor to keep your Grafana instance secure and up to date.

Best practices

• Regular Monitoring: Check the Advisor page often to identify and address emerging issues
• Immediate Action: Address “Action needed” items promptly to ensure system reliability
• Systematic Review: After fixing flagged issues, use the “Refresh” button to confirm all checks pass
• Proactive Updates: Address plugin update recommendations under “Investigation needed” even if they haven’t caused failures yet