Grafana Backup Tool

A Python-based application to backup Grafana settings using the Grafana API.

The aim of this tool is to:

1. Easily backup and restore Grafana.
2. Have versioned backups(date and time in file name) for restoring and saving to cloud storage providers. Currently support
   1. Amazon S3
   2. Azure Storage
   3. GCP Cloud Storage (Use service-account's credential file, see here)

Supported components

• Folder
• Folder Permissions
• Library Elements (doesn't work with Grafana 8.0.0 but 8.4.3)
• Dashboard (contains Alert)
• Datasource
• Alert Channel
• Alert Rules (Supported in version 9.4.0 of grafana and up.)
• Teams
• Team Members (Needs Basic Authentication (username and password, see grafana doc)
  • You need to set Admin's account and password in grafanaSettings.json, or set the base64 encoded admin account and password in ENV GRAFANA_BASIC_AUTH. E.g export GRAFANA_BASIC_AUTH=YWRtaW46YWRtaW4=
  • Or Sets this ENV of the Grafana server GF_USERS_ALLOW_ORG_CREATE=true. see grafana doc
• Organization (Needs Basic Authentication (username and password, see grafana doc)
  • You need to set Admin's account and password in grafanaSettings.json, or set the base64 encoded admin account and password in ENV GRAFANA_BASIC_AUTH. E.g export GRAFANA_BASIC_AUTH=YWRtaW46YWRtaW4=
  • Or Sets this ENV of the Grafana server GF_USERS_ALLOW_ORG_CREATE=true. see grafana doc
• User (Needs Basic Authentication (username and password, see grafana doc)
  • You need to set Admin's account and password in grafanaSettings.json, or set the base64 encoded admin account and password in ENV GRAFANA_BASIC_AUTH. E.g export GRAFANA_BASIC_AUTH=YWRtaW46YWRtaW4=
  • Grafana's api doesn't provide user's password when backing up, so the default_user_password in grafanaSettings.json, or in ENV DEFAULT_USER_PASSWORD, E.g export DEFAULT_USER_PASSWORD=supersecret will be used when restoring.
• Snapshots
• Dashboard Versions (only backup, no restore)
• Annotations

NOTE The only supported orgId right now is 1, the default organization will be backed up only!

Requirements

• Bash
• Python 2.7 or Python 3.x
• Access to a Grafana API server.
• A Token of an Admin role (see Configuration section below for more info)

Configuration

There are three ways to setup the configuration:

1. Use environment variables to define the variables for connecting to a Grafana server.
2. Use hard-coded settings in conf/grafanaSettings.json (this is the default settings file if not specified otherwise).
3. Use ~/.grafana-backup.json to define variables in json format.

Example Config

• Copy grafanaSettings.example.json and modify it for you to use, remove azure, aws, gcp, influxdb blocks (but keep the ones you used).
• Check out the examples folder for more configuration details.

NOTE If you use environment variables, you need to add the following to your .bashrc or execute once before using the tool (please change variables according to your setup):

(GRAFANA_HEADERS is optional, use it if necessary. please see #45)

### Do not use a trailing slash on GRAFANA_URL
export GRAFANA_URL=http://some.host.org:3000
export GRAFANA_TOKEN=eyJrIjoidUhaU2ZQQndrWFN3RRVkUnVfrT56a1JoaG9KWFFObEgiLCJuIjoiYWRtaW4iLCJpZCI6MX0=

# GRAFANA_HEADERS is optional
export GRAFANA_HEADERS=Host:some.host.org

To create and obtain a Token for your Grafana server, please refer to the official documentation.

NOTE that you need to generate a Token with an Admin role for the backup to succeed, otherwise you will have potential permission issues.

Installation

Virtual environment (optional but recommended)

Create a virtualenv, you could using something like pyenv if you'd prefer

virtualenv -p $(which python3) venv
source venv/bin/activate

Installation using pypi

pip install grafana-backup

Installation using this repo

First clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/ysde/grafana-backup-tool.git
cd grafana-backup-tool

Installation works best using pip

pip install .

How to Use

• First perform the Configuration and Installation sections as described above.
• Use the grafana-backup save command to backup all your folders, dashboards, datasources and alert channels to the _OUTPUT_ subdirectory of the current directory.

Example:

$ grafana-backup save
$ tree _OUTPUT_
_OUTPUT_/
└── 202006272027.tar.gz

• Use the grafana-backup restore <archive_file> command with a path to a previous backup to restore everything.

NOTE this may result in data loss, by overwriting data on the server.

Example:

$ grafana-backup restore _OUTPUT_/202006272027.tar.gz

Docker

Replace variables below to use the Docker version of this tool

• {YOUR_GRAFANA_TOKEN}: Your Grafana site Token.
• {YOUR_GRAFANA_URL}: Your Grafana site URL.
• {YOUR_BACKUP_FOLDER_ON_THE_HOST}: The backup folder on the Grafana host machine.

Kubernetes

Check out the CronJob in examples for a simple example of how grafana-backup-tool can be ran within a Kubernetes environment

Backup

If you decide to use a volume (-v) then you'll need to create the volume first with 1337 uid/gid ownership first, example:

mkdir /tmp/backup
sudo chown 1337:1337 /tmp/backup

docker run --user $(id -u):$(id -g) --rm --name grafana-backup-tool \
           -e GRAFANA_TOKEN={YOUR_GRAFANA_TOKEN} \
           -e GRAFANA_URL={YOUR_GRAFANA_URL} \
           -e GRAFANA_ADMIN_ACCOUNT={YOUR_GRAFANA_ADMIN_ACCOUNT} \
           -e GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD={YOUR_GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD} \
           -e VERIFY_SSL={True/False} \
           -v {YOUR_BACKUP_FOLDER_ON_THE_HOST}:/opt/grafana-backup-tool/_OUTPUT_  \
           ysde/docker-grafana-backup-tool

Example:

docker run --user $(id -u):$(id -g) --rm --name grafana-backup-tool \
           -e GRAFANA_TOKEN="eyJrIjoiNGZqTDEyeXNaY0RsMXNhbkNTSnlKN2M3bE1VeHdqVTEiLCJuIjoiZ3JhZmFuYS1iYWNrdXAiLCJpZCI6MX0=" \
           -e GRAFANA_URL=http://192.168.0.79:3000 \
           -e GRAFANA_ADMIN_ACCOUNT=admin \
           -e GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD=adminpassword \
           -e VERIFY_SSL=False \
           -v /tmp/backup/:/opt/grafana-backup-tool/_OUTPUT_ \
           ysde/docker-grafana-backup-tool

S3 Example: Set S3 configurations in -e or grafanaSettings.json(example)

           -e AWS_S3_BUCKET_NAME="my-backups-bucket" \
           -e AWS_S3_BUCKET_KEY="grafana-backup-folder" \
           -e AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="us-east-1" \
           -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="secret" \
           -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="secret" \

Azure Example: Set Azure configurations in -e or grafanaSettings.json(example)

           -e AZURE_STORAGE_CONTAINER_NAME="azure-storage-container-name" \
           -e AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING="azure-storage-connection-string"

GCS Example: Set GCS configurations in -e or grafanaSettings.json(example)

           -e GCS_BUCKET_NAME="backups-bucket-name" \
           -e GCS_BUCKET_PATH="grafana-backup-folder" \
           -e GCLOUD_PROJECT="gcp-project-name" \
           -e GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="credential-file-path"

Restore

docker run --user $(id -u):$(id -g) --rm --name grafana-backup-tool \
           -e GRAFANA_TOKEN={YOUR_GRAFANA_TOKEN} \
           -e GRAFANA_URL={YOUR_GRAFANA_URL} \
           -e GRAFANA_ADMIN_ACCOUNT={YOUR_GRAFANA_ADMIN_ACCOUNT} \
           -e GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD={YOUR_GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD} \
           -e VERIFY_SSL={True/False} \
           -e RESTORE="true" \
           -e ARCHIVE_FILE={THE_ARCHIVED_FILE_NAME} \
           -v {YOUR_BACKUP_FOLDER_ON_THE_HOST}:/opt/grafana-backup-tool/_OUTPUT_  \
           ysde/docker-grafana-backup-tool

Example:

docker run --user $(id -u):$(id -g) --rm --name grafana-backup-tool \
           -e GRAFANA_TOKEN="eyJrIjoiNGZqTDEyeXNaY0RsMXNhbkNTSnlKN2M3bE1VeHdqVTEiLCJuIjoiZ3JhZmFuYS1iYWNrdXAiLCJpZCI6MX0=" \
           -e GRAFANA_URL=http://192.168.0.79:3000 \
           -e GRAFANA_ADMIN_ACCOUNT=admin \
           -e GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD=adminpassword \
           -e VERIFY_SSL=False \
           -e RESTORE="true" \
           -e ARCHIVE_FILE="202006280247.tar.gz" \
           -v /tmp/backup/:/opt/grafana-backup-tool/_OUTPUT_ \
           ysde/docker-grafana-backup-tool

Building

You can build the docker image simply by executing make in the root of this repo. The image will get tagged as ysde:grafana-backup

Monitoring

InfluxDB support has been added and Prometheus push gateway support will be added in the future.

In order to monitor successful backups with InfluxDB simply configure grafana-backup InfluxDB settings using this example configuration. Or if you prefer to use environment variables you can instead set INFLUXDB_HOST, INFLUXDB_PORT, INFLUXDB_MEASUREMENT, INFLUXDB_USERNAME and INFLUXDB_PASSWORD.

Once configured grafana-backup will automatically enter a 1 in your defined timeseries measurement upon each successful backup.