Grafana MCP bindet Dashboards und Metriken direkt in Claude Code an

Posted on Oct 13 • Originally published at quickpromptco.com

When something breaks in production, the usual Claude Code loop is: open Grafana, find the right dashboard, squint at a spike, copy a PromQL query or a chunk of Loki logs, paste it into the terminal, and repeat when Claude asks for a wider time range. You end up as a slow, lossy copy-paste bridge between your metrics and your agent.

Grafana MCP is Grafana Labs’ official MCP server. It lets Claude Code search your dashboards, run PromQL against Prometheus and LogQL against Loki, read alert rules and their firing state, and look up incidents on its own. It works with self-hosted Grafana 9.0+ and Grafana Cloud, and it’s open source (Apache 2.0).

Pair it with our Sentry MCP guide: Sentry tells Claude which error is happening, Grafana shows when it started and what the metrics were doing around it.

Create a Grafana service account token with the Viewer role (Administration → Users and access → Service accounts), then run:

claude mcp add --scope user --transport stdio grafana \ --env GRAFANA_URL = http://localhost:3000 \ --env GRAFANA_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN = <your-token> \ -- uvx mcp-grafana --disable-write Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Replace <your-token> with your token, and swap the URL for your Grafana Cloud address ( https://myinstance.grafana.net ) if you use Cloud. Restart Claude Code and run claude mcp list. Total time: about 5 minutes.

Skip the manual steps below and hand the whole job to the agent instead:

You have shell access and the `claude mcp` CLI on this machine. Connect the Grafana MCP server (grafana/mcp-grafana) to Claude Code in read-only mode and report back. Do not tell me it's done unless step 5 actually confirms it: 1.

Run `uvx --version`. If uv is missing, install it with the official installer for this OS (macOS/Linux: `curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh`, Windows PowerShell: `powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"`), then re-check. 2.

Run `claude mcp list`. If a grafana entry already exists, stop and show me its config instead of adding a second one. 3.

Ask me for two values: my Grafana URL (e.g. http://localhost:3000 or https://myinstance.grafana.net) and a service account token. Tell me to create the token in Grafana under Administration > Users and access > Service accounts, with the Viewer role. Never echo the token back in chat or write it to any file other than the Claude Code config.

4. Add the server for all projects, read-only: `claude mcp add --scope user --transport stdio grafana --env GRAFANA_URL=<url> --env GRAFANA_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN=<token> -- uvx mcp-grafana --disable-write` 5. Run `claude mcp list` and confirm grafana shows Connected.

Then call the Grafana search tool and list the first 5 dashboard titles. If any step fails, give me the exact error and the command that produced it. A 400 "id is invalid" error on datasource tools means Grafana is older than 9.0, so say that instead of retrying.

Do not skip ahead. Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode The agent can’t create the service account token for you, so the prompt stops and asks for it. That’s intentional: you decide what role the token gets.

Prefer to do it by hand instead of delegating to the agent? Here’s the manual version.

uvx --version Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode No Grafana to test against? Start a throwaway local one with Docker, then sign in at http://localhost:3000 (admin / admin):

docker run -d --name grafana -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Step 2 — Create a service account token ~2 min

In Grafana, go to Administration → Users and access → Service accounts, select Add service account, give it the Viewer role, then Add service account token and copy it. You won’t see it again.

Want Claude to create dashboards or silence alerts later? Give the account the Editor role instead and drop --disable-write in Step 3.

--scope user makes it available in every project. Everything after -- is passed to the server, which is where --disable-write goes:

claude mcp add --scope user --transport stdio grafana \ --env GRAFANA_URL = http://localhost:3000 \ --env GRAFANA_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN = <your-token> \ -- uvx mcp-grafana --disable-write Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Real run, October 2026, Claude Code 2.1.291. Keep the server name before the --env flags: placed after them, Claude Code reads it as one more variable and stops with Invalid environment variable format. Connected means the server started; it only calls Grafana when a tool runs.

Prometheus, Loki, dashboards, alerting, and incidents are on by default. Other datasources are off until you enable them with --enabled-tools, for example sql, cloudwatch, elasticsearch, or influxdb. You can also switch off categories you never use, such as --disable-oncall, to keep Claude’s tool list short.

Claude Code queries the same dashboards, metrics, and alerts you check during an incident.

claude mcp list Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode ✔ grafana uvx mcp-grafana –disable-write – Connected! grafana 401 Unauthorized → token is wrong or was deleted; create a new one ✘ grafana Failed to connect → run uvx mcp-grafana --help to see the real error

Search my Grafana dashboards, pick the one for the API service, and tell me if the error rate changed in the last 6 hours Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode If Claude calls a dashboard search tool, then a Prometheus or Loki query tool, and answers with actual numbers from your data, the token, the URL, and the datasource access are all working.

Yes. The server is open source under Apache 2.0. You need a Grafana instance, and the free Grafana Cloud tier or a self-hosted OSS install both work.

Yes. Set GRAFANA_URL to your stack address, such as https://myinstance.grafana.net, and use a service account token from that stack. Some tools, like Sift investigations, only exist on Cloud.

Not with the setup in this guide. --disable-write removes the write tools, and a Viewer token can’t write anyway. Remove both only if you want Claude to edit things.

Yes. The project also ships a Docker image, prebuilt binaries, and a Helm chart. The README’s Usage section covers each one.

claude mcp remove grafana --scope user, then delete the service account token in Grafana so it can’t be reused.

Originally published at quickpromptco.com, where the guide is kept up to date.