GitHub integration for Grafana Cloud

GitHub is a provider of Internet hosting for software development and version control using Git.

This integration includes 2 pre-built dashboards to help monitor and visualize GitHub metrics.

Before you begin

Provide a GitHub personal access token so you don’t reach the GitHub API rate limit too early.

Give the token only the minimum permissions it needs to monitor your repositories. All required permissions are read-only. For details, refer to Permissions required for fine-grained personal access tokens.

Install GitHub integration for Grafana Cloud

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
Find GitHub and click its tile to open the integration.
Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Alloy to send GitHub metrics to your Grafana Cloud instance.
Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboards to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your GitHub setup.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Alloy

Advanced mode

The following snippets provide examples to guide you through the configuration process.

To instruct Grafana Alloy to scrape your GitHub instances, manually copy and append the snippets to your alloy configuration file, then follow subsequent instructions.

Advanced integrations snippets

prometheus.exporter.github "integrations_github_exporter" {
	repositories   = ["grafana/alloy"]
	api_token_file = "<path to your github api token file>"
}

discovery.relabel "integrations_github_exporter" {
	targets = prometheus.exporter.github.integrations_github_exporter.targets

	rule {
		target_label = "instance"
		replacement  = constants.hostname
	}

	rule {
		target_label = "job"
		replacement  = "integrations/github_exporter"
	}
}

prometheus.scrape "integrations_github_exporter" {
	targets    = discovery.relabel.integrations_github_exporter.output
	forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.metrics_service.receiver]
	job_name   = "integrations/github_exporter"
}

This integrations uses the prometheus.exporter.github component to generate metrics from a GitHub instance.

In the Alloy configuration file, specify the repositories you want to collect statistics from. You can specify entire organizations or users, list individual repositories, or combine both. The snippets use the api_token_file parameter to avoid setting the authentication token directly in the Alloy configuration file. Set it to the path of a file that contains your GitHub personal access token.

For the full array of configuration options, refer to the prometheus.exporter.github documentation.

To apply the necessary relabeling, link the exporter with a discovery.relabel component.

Create a pair of these components for each GitHub instance you want to monitor.

Configure the following properties within each discovery.relabel component:

instance label: constants.hostname sets the instance label to your Alloy server hostname. You can also change it to a value that uniquely identifies this GitHub instance.

You can then scrape them by including each discovery.relabel under targets within the prometheus.scrape component.

Dashboards

The GitHub integration installs the following dashboards in your Grafana Cloud instance to help monitor your system.

GitHub API Usage
GitHub Repository Stats

Metrics

The most important metrics provided by the GitHub integration, which are used on the pre-built dashboards, are as follows:

github_rate_limit
github_rate_remaining
github_repo_forks
github_repo_open_issues
github_repo_pull_request_count
github_repo_size_kb
github_repo_stars
github_repo_watchers
up

Changelog

# 1.0.1 - October 2026

* Update Grafana Alloy configuration snippets to use `api_token_file` instead of a hardcoded `api_token`, and use `grafana/alloy` as the example repository.
* Fix the personal access token documentation links.

# 1.0.0 - February 2024

* Update mixin to replace all Angular panels with React based panels.

# 0.0.5 - September 2023

* Update Grafana Agent configuration snippets to include filtered metrics used in gauge panels

# 0.0.4 - August 2023

* New Filter Metrics option for configuring the Grafana Agent, which saves on metrics cost by dropping any metric not used by this integration. Beware that anything custom built using metrics that are not on the snippet will stop working.
* New hostname relabel option, which applies the instance name you write on the text box to the Grafana Agent configuration snippets, making it easier and less error prone to configure this mandatory label.

# 0.0.3 - September 2022

* Update dashboard panels descriptions.

# 0.0.2 - October 2021

* Update mixin to latest version:
  - Update the datasource template variable label to 'Data Source'

# 0.0.1 - August 2021

* Initial release

Cost

By connecting your GitHub instance to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, see Active series and dpm usage and Cloud tier pricing.