Grafana Integration
Thomas Steele avatar
Written by Thomas Steele
Updated over a week ago

Blue Matador’s Grafana integration allows you to view Blue Matador events as annotations in your Grafana dashboards. You can use it to enhance your existing dashboards or to correlate with metrics you’re collecting in Grafana.

Requirements

Using the Blue Matador Grafana integration requires either an active trial or paid account. Contact sales to get started.  You will also need to meet the following requirements:

  • An existing Grafana installation to use with the integration

Installation Process

1. Log in to Blue Matador and navigate to the Notifications page via Setup > Notifications

2. Expand the Grafana installation dialog by clicking on the Connect button on the Grafana tile

3. Set the display name for your Grafana integration. This will allow you to identify your Grafana integration if you choose to set up multiple integrations (you will need an integration per annotation query).

4. Choose which events will be visible in Grafana. You can choose to see only events of a certain severity or, if you have Projects enabled, you can make the same choices by project.

5. Install the Blue Matador Grafana Datasource. First, download the plugin from its Github repo. Then, unzip the plugin into Grafana's plugin directory, which is /var/lib/grafana/plugins. Restart Grafana.

6. Create a new datasource in Grafana by choosing Blue Matador from the list of available data sources. Copy your account ID and API key into the form fields in Grafana. This step can be skipped if you create more Grafana integrations in Blue Matador.

Blue Matador

Grafana

7. On each dashboard where you'd like to see Blue Matador events, add a new Blue Matador annotation query by selecting Blue Matador as the query source. Copy the integration ID from Blue Matador into the form field in Grafana.

Blue Matador 

 Grafana

8. Save the integration. Grafana will be unable to retrieve events from Blue Matador until you save.

9. View your dashboard in Grafana

Troubleshooting

If you don’t see Blue Matador events in your Grafana dashboard, follow these steps to troubleshoot:

  1. Ensure that you have events in Blue Matador during the dashboard’s selected time range. If you’ve configured Projects, make sure that the events you see are assigned to projects that are requested by your Grafana Integration.

  2. Refresh your Grafana browser tab. Sometimes Grafana does not make a annotations request immediately after you change configuration.

  3. Check that your Grafana installation has network permissions to connect to app.bluematador.com:443

  4. If your Grafana dashboard is still unable to pull in Blue Matador events, you should contact your account manager to have our engineering team look into it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the Grafana integration cost extra? All of the Blue Matador integrations are available during the free trial period and with any paid account.

Can I have multiple Grafana integrations? Blue Matador supports as many Grafana integrations as you need. You can reuse the same Grafana integration as a annotation source on as many dashboards as you’d like and you will only need to set up one Blue Matador datasource in Grafana. However, if you’d like to have different sets of events on different dashboards, you’ll have to set up an integration for each distinct set of events.

How do I disable a Grafana integration? To disabled a Grafana integration, navigate to the Notifications page via Setup > Notifications and find the integration in the list of configured integrations. Click on the tile and select Disable Integration to disable your integration.

This will result in an empty set of events being sent each time Grafana requests events from Blue Matador. To fully disable the integration, remove the annotation query in the Grafana dashboard settings.

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