How to use the Grafana forums

Grafana
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We’re the Grafana community squad - Usman, Imma, and Antonio. We moderate and admin the forum, offer technical help, and keep the community aware of what’s new and changing. We also triage incoming issues & feature requests from our community in the GitHub grafana/grafana repository.

As we’ve observed how the community uses the forum and GitHub, we created this post to help you to get better responses and find thoughtful questions to answer.

How to write a forum post that gets noticed

The community wants to help you! First, we need to understand the problem you’re trying to solve and what you’ve already tried. To help us help you, use these tips when creating your post:

  • Search first - see if someone else has already asked and received an answer to your question. Searching might be how you found the forum in the first place. :slightly_smiling_face:

  • Ask only one question per post - this makes it easy for other people to find your question and reuse the answer to solve the same problem for themselves.

  • Post in the right category and use tags - categories and tags make it easier to get help from knowledgeable community members on the specific topic, data source, or visualization you want help with.

  • Write in English - helps to reach the widest number of community members.

  • Use a short descriptive title

  • Format your text instead of images - text errors, queries, config lines, logs or templates make it easy to read and copy so we can search or try your code

  • Give us context

    • Which version/plugin version is used?
    • How your stack is deployed and started (Docker, Kubernetes, package, …)?
    • What is the problem you’re trying to solve?
    • What did you already try?
    • Did this work before? If so, what changed? Check out the grafana release notes to find out if the change is expected.
    • Make a video or share screenshots of questions about the UI.
      • Carefully obscure sensitive identifying information (e.g. API keys, tokens, credentials,…)
    • Tell us about your environment - complete the new topic template when you create your post and include as many details as possible.
    • If you’re noticing an issue with a dashboard, use the get help feature to create and share a randomized sample of your dashboard JSON and data
    • Are there error messages?
    • Increase Grafana log level to debug and provide debug server logs? Problems may be in the browser only, so you should provide your browser console errors in this case.

  • Follow up! When the community responds to offer help or ask questions to understand your problem better, be responsive. We love it when you mark a solution, say thank you, or ask for more help if the initial responses didn’t solve the problem for you.

How to report a bug

First, determine if it is a bug:

If you notice different behavior after an update, check out the grafana release notes to find out if the change is expected.

Report a bug

If you suspect it’s a bug:

  • A feature isn’t working as documented
  • Missing or incorrect documentation
  • Inconsistent behavior or errors in Grafana features or platform

Please let us know in the grafana/grafana GitHub repository.

Choose the appropriate type of issue:

Provide as much information as possible including step-by-step instructions to reproduce the issue. Attaching logs, screenshots, and screencasts will help the developers during the investigation process.

How to submit a feature request

You can open a feature request at Sign in to GitHub · GitHub and adding feature request to the title of the issue.

Please fill out the template and give us as much information as possible to explain the feature and why you want it.

The Grafana community squad regularly reviews feature requests and assigns popular requests to the developer squads for additional review.

Where should I ask: GitHub or the community forum?

The Grafana community squad is active in both GitHub and the community forum. Here’s a list you can refer to if you’re not sure about the appropriate channel:

Github

  • Bugs
  • Feature requests
  • Review our security policy and report a vulnerability privately
  • Documentation suggestions
  • Submit a PR

Community forum

  • Questions and answers about how to use the Grafana stack or the various data sources
  • Discussions with the Community and Grafanistas
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