I wanted to put some metrics, like measurement of my car’s battery voltage into Grafana Cloud.
If I were to be honest, the whole Grafana stack, while being amazing, it’s terribly confusing.
So, while browsing the panel I found the Usage section on the main page, which has summary for Metrics - it sounds like the right place. So when I hovered over Metrics I got popup:
No data detected
Connect data to get started (link)
So, I clicked that link, chose that I want to send metrics to fully managed Prometheus Stack (since I am new to Prometheus and popup suggests it’s the best choice in this scenario).
Then considering it’s neither Linux, Windows nor Kubernetes, I chose Custom Setup Options.
It revealed 4 options, one of which is Send Metrics over HTTP which honestly sounds really nice to me - I measure voltage once in a while and send it to Grafana when it’s ready.
It asked me about few details, so I generated API key, and chose Graphite, since it sounded simpler. I took example cURL, saw I got {"published": 1} response, so I plugged it into my NodeRed instance.
NodeRed happily sends the data, I get 200 and this published response, yet I can’t see any data in the grafana panel.
Here’s response:
{
"payload":{
"published":1
},
"_msgid":"e87e91f2cab97922",
"statusCode":200,
"headers":{
"content-length":"15",
"content-type":"text/plain; charset=utf-8",
"date":"Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:52:46 GMT",
"grafana-trace-id":"245be08648f207b64922de1dded209af",
"server":"GEM/r402-3431ade1",
"vary":"Accept-Encoding",
"via":"1.1 google",
"alt-svc":"h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; ma=2592000",
"x-node-red-request-node":"5204c90c"
},
"responseUrl":"https://graphite-prod-01-eu-west-0.grafana.net/graphite/metrics",
"redirectList":[
],
"retry":0
}
It obviously is wrapped in all the NodeRed’s stuff, but clearly indicates success.
I can’t however see this, nor cURLed data anywhere.
I went to Explore tab, tried both Graphite and Prometheus, no series to choose, star (*) doesn’t show any data, Usage also shows no data ingested.
Am I understanding it all wrong?
Here’s body I am sending:
[{
"name":"traccar.zafira.voltage",
"interval":10,
"value":"msg.payload",
"tags":[
"source=traccar",
"vehicle=zafira",
"metric=batt_voltage"
],
"timestamp":"msg.timestamp"
}]
