Embed Grafana panels in Markdown (deprecated) (FREE)

WARNING: This feature was deprecated in GitLab 15.9 and is planned for removal in 16.0. We intend to replace this feature with the ability to embed charts with the GitLab Observability UI. This change is a breaking change.

Grafana panels can be embedded in GitLab Flavored Markdown. You can embed Grafana panels using either:

• Grafana-rendered images.
• Grafana API.

Use Grafana-rendered images

You can embed live Grafana panels as a direct link. Your Grafana instance must:

• Be available to the target user, either as a public dashboard or on the same network.
• Have Grafana Image Renderer installed.

To use Grafana-rendered images:

1. Go to the dashboard containing the panel in Grafana.
2. From the panel's menu, select Share.
3. Select Direct link rendered image, which provides the link.
4. Copy the link and add an image tag as inline HTML in your Markdown in the format <img src="your_link"/>. You can tweak the query parameters to meet your needs, such as removing the &from= and &to= parameters to display a live panel.

Use integration with Grafana API

Introduced in GitLab 12.5.

Each project can support integration with one Grafana instance. This enables you to copy a link to a panel in Grafana, then paste it into a GitLab Markdown field. The panel renders in the GitLab panel format. To embed panels from a Grafana instance, the data source must be:

• A Prometheus instance.
• Proxyable, so the HTTP > Access setting for the Grafana data source should be set to Server (default).

Set up Grafana integration

To set up the Grafana API in Grafana:

1. In Grafana, generate an Admin-level API Token.
2. In your GitLab project, go to Settings > Monitor and expand the Grafana authentication section.
3. To enable the integration, check the Active checkbox.
4. For Grafana URL, enter the base URL of the Grafana instance.
5. For API Token, enter the Administrator API token you just generated.
6. Select Save Changes.

NOTE: If the Grafana integration is enabled, users with the Reporter role on public projects and the Guest role on non-public projects can query metrics from the Prometheus instance. All requests proxied through GitLab are authenticated with the same Grafana Administrator API token.

Generate a link to a panel

To generate a link to a panel:

1. In Grafana, go to the dashboard you wish to embed a panel from.

2. In the upper-left corner of the page, select a specific value for each variable required for the queries in the dashboard.

3. In Grafana select a panel's title, then select Share to open the panel's sharing dialog to the Link tab.

   If you select the dashboard's share button instead, GitLab attempts to embed the first supported panel on the dashboard (if available).

4. If your Prometheus queries use the Grafana custom template variables, ensure the Template variables option is set to on. Only the Grafana global template variables $__interval, $__from, and $__to are supported.

5. Set the Current time range option to on, to specify the time range of the panel. Otherwise, the default range is the last 8 hours.

6. Select Copy to copy the URL to the clipboard.

7. In GitLab, paste the URL into a Markdown field and save. The panel takes a few moments to render.

See the following example of a rendered panel.