grafana-interacter

grafana-interacter is a tool to interact with your Grafana instance via a Telegram bot. Here's the list of currently supported commands:

• /render [<opts>] <panel name> - renders the panel and sends it as image. If there are multiple panels with the same name (for example, you have a dashboard1 and dashboard2 both containing panel with name panel), it will render the first panel it will find. For specifying it, you may add the dashboard name as a prefix to your query (like /render dashboard1 panel). You can also provide options in a key=value format, which will be internally passed to a /render query to Grafana. Some examples are from, to, width, height (the command would look something like /render from=now-14d to=now-7d width=100 height=100 dashboard1 panel). By default, the params are: width=1000&height=500&from=now-30m&to=now&tz=Europe/Moscow.
• /dashboards - will list Grafana dashboards and links to them.
• /dashboard <name> - will return a link to a dashboard and its panels.
• /datasources - will return Grafana datasources.
• /alerts - will list both Grafana alerts and Prometheus alerts from all Prometheus datasources, if any
• /firing - will list firing and pending alerts from both Grafana and Prometheus datasources, along with their details
• /silence <duration> <params> - creates a silence for Grafana alert. You need to pass a duration (like /silence 2h test alert) and some params for matching alerts to silence. You may use = for matching the value exactly (example: /silence 2h host=localhost), != for matching everything except this value (example: /silence 2h host!=localhost), =~ for matching everything that matches the regexp (example: /silence 2h host=~local), , !~ for matching everything that doesn't match the regexp (example: /silence 2h host!~local), or just provide a string that will be treated as an alert name (example: /silence 2h test alert).
• /silences - list silences (both active and expired).
• /unsilence <silence ID> - deletes a silence.
• /alertmanager_silences - same as /silences, but using external Alertmanager.
• /alertmanager_silence - same as /silence, but using external Alertmanager.
• /alertmanager_unsilence - same as /unsilence, but using external Alertmanager.

How can I set it up?

Prerequisite: You need Grafana itself with new alerting enabled, as well as the grafana-image-renderer plugin for rendering dashboards.

Before starting, you need to create a Telegram bot. Go to @Botfather at Telegram and create a new bot there. For bot commands, put the following:

start - Display help message
help - Display help message
render - Render a panel
dashboards - List dashboards
dashboard - See dashboard and its panels
alerts - See alerts
firing - See firing and pending alerts
datasources - See Grafana datasources
silence - Creates a new silence
silences - List all silences
unsilence - Deletes a silence
alertmanager_silence - Creates a new Alertmanager silence
alertmanager_silences - List all Alertmanager silences
alertmanager_unsilence - Deletes an Alertmanager silence

Save the bot token somewhere, you'll need it later to for grafana-interacter to function.

Then, you need to download the latest release from the releases page. After that, you should unzip it and you are ready to go:

wget <the link from the releases page>
tar xvfz grafana-interacter-*
./grafana-interacter --config <path to config>

What you probably want to do is to have it running in the background in a detached mode. For that, first of all, we have to copy the file to the system apps folder:

sudo cp ./grafana-interacter /usr/bin

Then we need to create a systemd service for our app:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/grafana-interacter.service

You can use this template (change the user to whatever user you want this to be executed from. It's advised to create a separate user for that instead of running it from root):

[Unit]
Description=grafana-interacter
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=<username>
TimeoutStartSec=0
CPUWeight=95
IOWeight=95
ExecStart=grafana-interacter --config <path to config>
Restart=always
RestartSec=2
LimitNOFILE=800000
KillSignal=SIGTERM

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then we'll add this service to the autostart and run it:

sudo systemctl enable grafana-interacter # set it to start on system load
sudo systemctl start grafana-interacter  # start it
sudo systemctl status grafana-interacter # validate it's running

If you need to, you can also see the logs of the process:

sudo journalctl -u grafana-interacter -f --output cat

How does it work?

It queries Grafana via its API and returns the data as a Telegram message.

How can I configure it?

All configuration is executed via a .yml config, which is passed as a --config variable. Check out config.example.yml for reference.

How can I contribute?

Bug reports and feature requests are always welcome! If you want to contribute, feel free to open issues or PRs.