Set up Grafana for high availability

Setting up Grafana for high availability is fairly simple. You just need a shared database for storing dashboard, users, and other persistent data. So the default embedded SQLite database will not work, you will have to switch to MySQL or Postgres.

Configure multiple servers to use the same database

First, you need to set up MySQL or Postgres on another server and configure Grafana to use that database. You can find the configuration for doing that in the [database] section in the Grafana config. Grafana will now persist all long term data in the database. How to configure the database for high availability is out of scope for this guide. We recommend finding an expert on the database you’re using.

Alerting

Grafana 8 alerts

Grafana 8 Alerts provides a new highly-available model under the hood. It preserves the previous semantics by executing all alerts on every server and notifications are sent only once per alert. There is no support for load distribution between servers at this time.

For configuration, follow the guide.

Legacy dashboard alerts

Legacy Grafana alerting supports a limited form of high availability. Alert notifications are deduplicated when running multiple servers. This means all alerts are executed on every server but alert notifications are only sent once per alert. Grafana does not support load distribution between servers.

Grafana Live

Grafana Live works with limitations in highly available setup. For details, refer to the Grafana Live documentation.

User sessions

Grafana uses auth token strategy with database by default. This means that a load balancer can send a user to any Grafana server without having to log in on each server.