New in Grafana 9.5: Debug Grafana instances faster with support bundles
With the arrival of Grafana 9.5, we’re excited to introduce Grafana support bundles — a tool to help debug your Grafana instance faster and more easily. Support bundles provide a simple way to gather and share information about your Grafana instance, and this feature is available across all tiers in Grafana Cloud as well as in Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise.
What are support bundles?
A support bundle is a collection of files, each containing some information about your Grafana instance. They can be created and downloaded through Grafana’s user interface. You can then examine the support bundle yourself, share it with your colleagues, or send it to Grafana’s contributors or the Grafana Labs support team.
Support bundles can contain a variety of information about your Grafana instance, and they currently cover the following areas:
- Basic information: version and resource usage of the Grafana instance
- Database and migration: type and version of the database used by the Grafana instance and a migration log
- LDAP: LDAP auth provider configuration and connection health check
- OAuth2: metadata and connection health check for each supported OAuth2 provider
- Plugins: information about plugins that have been installed for this Grafana instance
- SAML: SAML auth provider metadata and connection health check
- Settings: Grafana instance configuration
- Usage statistics: report of usage of different Grafana features
- Users: list of users and user metadata
Basic information about the Grafana instance is always added to support bundles, but apart from that, it’s up to the creator of a support bundle to decide what information they want to include in it.
Support bundles can also be encrypted. This is useful if you want to allow your users to create support bundles, but you don’t want them to see the content of any other support bundles related to your instance. As support bundles can contain sensitive information about your Grafana instance, we encourage you to encrypt your support bundles and only share the means to decrypt them with a few trusted parties. Support bundles for all Grafana Cloud instances are encrypted by default and can be decrypted by the Grafana team.
Find out more about support bundles and how to encrypt them in our support bundles documentation.
When to use support bundles
When you encounter a problem with your Grafana instance, you’ll likely need to obtain some information to help you debug and diagnose the issue. Gathering information from various sources (configuration files, database and API endpoints to name a few) is time-consuming and error prone.
Support bundles simplify and speed up information retrieval, so you can focus on resolving the issue at hand. They will also help you pass on information to Grafana’s support team and engineers more easily if you need assistance.
How to use support bundles in Grafana
You can configure support bundles in Grafana’s configuration file. It allows you to disable support bundles, set public keys for bundle encryption, and specify which role grants access to using support bundles.
[support_bundles]
# Enable support bundle creation (default: true)
enabled = true
# Only server admins can generate and view support bundles. When set to false, organization admins can generate and view support bundles (default: true)
server_admin_only = true
# If set, bundles will be encrypted with the provided public keys separated by whitespace
public_keys = ""Once support bundles have been configured, you will find them under the Help section in Grafana. It’s on the bottom left corner (or top right corner if you’re using the new navigation layout).
Once you’ve navigated to support bundles, you can click on New support bundle to create one. Select the information that you want to include in it, and click on Create.
Once the support bundle has been created, you can download it and inspect it yourself, or share it with others.
What’s next for support bundles in Grafana?
We plan to keep expanding support bundles to also include other information, such as Grafana server logs. We also would love to find out what types of information you would like to gather through support bundles. Reach out to us with any suggestions or feedback in the Grafana Labs Community Slack, or directly through the GitHub repository for Grafana.
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