Configure Grafana

Tier: Free, Premium, Ultimate Offering: Self-managed, GitLab Dedicated
History
  • Grafana bundled with GitLab was deprecated in GitLab 16.0.
  • Grafana bundled with GitLab was removed in GitLab 16.3.

Grafana is a tool that enables you to visualize time series metrics through graphs and dashboards. GitLab writes performance data to Prometheus, and Grafana allows you to query the data to display graphs.

Integrate with GitLab UI

After setting up Grafana, you can enable a link to access it from the GitLab sidebar:

  1. On the left sidebar, at the bottom, select Admin.
  2. Select Settings > Metrics and profiling.
  3. Expand Metrics - Grafana.
  4. Select the Add a link to Grafana checkbox.
  5. Configure the Grafana URL. Enter the full URL of the Grafana instance.
  6. Select Save changes.

GitLab displays your link in the Admin area under Monitoring > Metrics Dashboard.

Required Scopes

When setting up Grafana through the process above, no scope shows in the screen in the Admin area under Applications > GitLab Grafana. However, the read_user scope is required and is provided to the application automatically. Setting any scope other than read_user without also including read_user leads to this error when you try to sign in using GitLab as the OAuth provider: 

The requested scope is invalid, unknown, or malformed.

If you see this error, make sure that one of the following is true in the GitLab Grafana configuration screen:

  • No scopes appear.
  • The read_user scope is included.