Grafana Play updates: recent growth, new privacy policies, and more

It’s hard to believe Grafana Play has been around for almost a decade. The platform continues to be a great way to demo Grafana, play around with new features, learn what’s possible, and simply have fun with data.

Grafana Play provides a publicly available version of Grafana Cloud, and requires no login for access. It’s preloaded with a wide range of sample dashboards that teach users how to work with data sources, create visualizations, and explore advanced Grafana features. Over the years, many users have also leveraged Grafana Play as a teaching tool, and we’ve been working hard to better support this use case. For example, in the past year, we’ve stabilized data sources and have linked many dashboards back to our documentation.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the history of Grafana Play, recent updates, and changes we’re making to protect your information via minimizing what we store.

Grafana Play: history, growth, and where we are today

Originally created in 2015 by Torkel Ödegaard, the creator of Grafana and co-founder of Grafana Labs, Grafana Play started as an open Grafana instance that anyone could log into to create and edit dashboards. In those early days, it was like a mix of a sandbox environment and Wikipedia for Grafana dashboards.

Over the years, Grafana Play has seen incredible growth. Thousands of dashboards have been created and shared by users from all around the world. We’ve been thrilled to see how many community members have contributed their expertise and shared knowledge through this platform.

As Grafana Play grew in popularity, we also saw an increase in the number of user accounts. In some cases, through the use of different OAuth methods, multiple accounts were being created for a single user. With growth in both Grafana Play and Grafana Labs itself, we had to put better safeguards in place.

Today, while anybody can view dashboards with or without logging in, we selectively grant access to edit dashboards, based on a conversation with the contributor. To be clear, we continue to take and actively encourage community contributions (more on that below).

New policy for inactive account removal

As part of our ongoing security and privacy efforts here at Grafana Labs, we are implementing a policy to delete inactive Grafana Play accounts.

A cornerstone of protecting user privacy is the practice of data minimization; we believe in only retaining data that serves a valid purpose to keep Play running for you. Deleting inactive accounts will help us protect your privacy and ensure we’re not holding data unnecessarily.

Starting March 3, 2025, Grafana Labs will remove inactive accounts that meet two criteria: they have not logged in for one year or more and they have never created dashboards or apps on Play.

Why this change? To minimize data retention and respect user privacy, aligning with our principles of holding only the data necessary to provide services.

What users can expect

Most users interact with Play anonymously, which means most won’t be impacted by these changes. If you do have an account on Play (which includes logging in via an OAuth provider, such as Google, GitHub, or Grafana), you will fall into one of the following categories:

• Contributors: If you’ve contributed dashboards, your account and contributions will remain untouched. Your account will not be deleted, no matter how long you’ve been inactive. You deserve credit, and keeping your author information attached to your work is important to us
• Active users: No changes. Your account will also remain untouched.
• Inactive users: If your account falls under the inactive category, it will be deleted unless you become active, which you can do simply by logging in using the credentials you want to keep.

How to contribute public dashboards to Play

If you want to become an active contributor to Grafana Play, we hope to hear from you. We love to host community dashboards that demonstrate fun and unique ways to use Grafana, whether it’s playing video games or monitoring the US electrical grid. We encourage you to share your dashboard ideas, and would love to discuss showcasing them on Play.

We’ve created a dedicated channel within our community Slack, #grafana-play, for discussions specifically about Grafana Play. Please join the conversation to share feedback, ask questions, or clarify anything related to our new policy.

Thank you for being a part of the Grafana Play community and helping us maintain a valuable resource for learning and sharing dashboard expertise!