Export logs of usage insights

{{< admonition type="note" >}} Available in Grafana Enterprise and to customers on select Grafana Cloud plans. For pricing information, visit pricing or contact our sales team. {{< /admonition >}}

By exporting usage logs to Loki, you can directly query them and create dashboards of the information that matters to you most, such as dashboard errors, most active organizations, or your top-10 most-used queries. This configuration is done for you in Grafana Cloud, with provisioned dashboards. Read about them in the Grafana Cloud documentation.

Usage insights logs

Usage insights logs are JSON objects that represent certain user activities, such as:

A user opens a dashboard.
A query is sent to a data source.

Scope

A log is created every time:

A user opens a dashboard.
A query is sent to a data source in the dashboard view.
A query is performed via Explore.

Format

Logs of usage insights contain the following fields, where the fields followed by * are always available, and the others depend on the logged event:

Field name	Type	Description
`eventName`*	string	Type of the event, which can be either `data-request` or `dashboard-view`.
`folderName`*	string	Name of the dashboard folder.
`dashboardName`*	string	Name of the dashboard where the event happened.
`dashboardId`*	number	ID of the dashboard where the event happened.
`datasourceName`	string	Name of the data source that was queried.
`datasourceType`	string	Type of the data source that was queried. For example, `prometheus`, `elasticsearch`, or `loki`.
`datasourceId`	number	ID of the data source that was queried.
`panelId`	number	ID of the panel of the query.
`panelName`	string	Name of the panel of the query.
`error`	string	Error returned by the query.
`duration`	number	Duration of the query.
`source`	string	Source of the query. For example, `dashboard` or `explore`.
`orgId`*	number	ID of the user’s organization.
`orgName`*	string	Name of the user’s organization.
`timestamp`*	string	The date and time that the request was made, in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in RFC3339 format.
`tokenId`*	number	ID of the user’s authentication token.
`username`*	string	Name of the Grafana user that made the request.
`userId`*	number	ID of the Grafana user that made the request.
`totalQueries`*	number	Number of queries executed for the data request.
`cachedQueries`*	number	Number of fetched queries that came from the cache.

Configuration

To export your logs, enable the usage insights feature and configure an export location in the configuration file:

ini

[usage_insights.export]
# Enable the usage insights export feature
enabled = true
# Storage type
storage = loki

The options for storage type are loki and logger (added in Grafana Enterprise 8.2).

If the storage type is set to loki you'll need to also configure Grafana to export to a Loki ingestion server. To do this, you'll need Loki installed. Refer to Install Loki for instructions on how to install Loki.

ini

[usage_insights.export.storage.loki]
# Set the communication protocol to use with Loki (can be grpc or http)
type = grpc
# Set the address for writing logs to Loki (format must be host:port)
url = localhost:9095
# Defaults to true. If true, it establishes a secure connection to Loki
tls = true
# Set the tenant ID for Loki communication, which is disabled by default.
# The tenant ID is required to interact with Loki running in multi-tenant mode.
tenant_id =
# How long to wait before sending a request to Loki with the batch of events. Uses duration format: e.g. 5s, 1m
# Whatever happens first between `batch_wait_duration` and `batch_size_bytes` will trigger the batch to be sent to Loki.
# If the wait duration is very long and the `batch_size_bytes` is very high, events may take a long time to be sent.
batch_wait_duration = 5s
# How many events (in bytes) to accumulate in a single batch before sending it to Loki.
# Whatever happens first between `batch_wait_duration` and `batch_size_bytes` will trigger the batch to be sent to Loki.
# If you wish to always wait for the `batch_wait_duration`, set this to a very high number.
batch_size_bytes = 102400 # 100KiB

Using logger will print usage insights to your Grafana server log. There is no option for configuring the logger storage type.

Visualize Loki usage insights in Grafana

If you export logs into Loki, you can build Grafana dashboards to understand your Grafana instance usage.

Add Loki as a data source. Refer to Grafana fundamentals tutorial.
Import one of the following dashboards:
- Usage insights
- Usage insights datasource details
Play with usage insights to understand them:
- In Explore, you can use the query {datasource="gdev-loki",kind="usage_insights"} to retrieve all logs related to your gdev-loki data source.
- In a dashboard, you can build a table panel with the query topk(10, sum by (error) (count_over_time({kind="usage_insights", datasource="gdev-prometheus"} | json | error != "" [$__interval]))) to display the 10 most common errors your users see using the gdev-prometheus data source.
- In a dashboard, you can build a graph panel with the queries sum by(host) (count_over_time({kind="usage_insights"} | json | eventName="data-request" | error != "" [$__interval])) and sum by(host) (count_over_time({kind="usage_insights"} | json | eventName="data-request" | error = "" [$__interval])) to show the evolution of the data request count over time. Using by (host) allows you to have more information for each Grafana server you have if you have set up Grafana for high availability.