Anonymous usage statistics

The Grafana MCP server can report limited usage statistics about itself to Grafana Labs. Grafana Labs uses this data to improve tools and investigate failures.

To preserve anonymity, the emitted data describes the shape of usage only. Things like tool arguments, resource names, dashboards, queries, log lines, error messages and credentials are never sent, and neither is the Grafana instance’s URL, hostname, stack slug, organisation name or organisation ID.

Nothing an MCP client reports about itself - things like name and version - is collected. Any other value that comes from outside the binary is reduced to a fixed vocabulary before being emitted, so we don’t emit a potentially-identifying value.

Note
Usage statistics reporting is disabled by default. To disable reporting explicitly, refer to Opt out.

Before you begin

Install the Grafana MCP server. Refer to Set up the Grafana MCP server.
Make sure you can change the server’s startup flags or environment variables. If you start the server from an MCP client, refer to Client configuration examples.

Understand which data is collected

Each server process generates one identifier, process_id, as a random UUID in memory when it starts.

Every event carries the following data:

Field	Description	Example
`service`	Always `mcp-grafana`.	`mcp-grafana`
`version`	The version of the `mcp-grafana` binary.	`1.4.2`
`os`	Operating system.	`linux`, `darwin`, `windows`
`arch`	CPU architecture.	`amd64`, `arm64`
`process_id`	A random per-process UID.	UUID
`report_reason`	Why this event was sent: `interval` (once every 4h) or `shutdown`.	`interval`
`process_uptime_ms`	How long the process had been running when the event was built, in milliseconds.	`1234`
`report_seq`	This process’s reports numbered from 1. A gap in the sequence for a `process_id` is a report that was built and never arrived.	`3`
`tools_called`	Comma-separated names of the tools called since the previous event.	`list_datasources,query_prometheus`
`tool_calls`	A nested object keyed by tool name, each holding `calls` and `errors`.	`{"query_prometheus":{"calls":4,"errors":1}}`
`grafana_version`	The version the Grafana instance reported. This is read from a response the server had already fetched for its own reasons, and truncated to 64 bytes. Absent whenever that version is not already known.	`12.1.0`
`target_kind`	`cloud` for Grafana Cloud or `self_hosted` for other hostnames. Grafana Cloud instances reached through custom domains report `self_hosted`.	`cloud`
`auth_method`	The credential category the connection resolved, from a fixed vocabulary.	`service_account_token`
`transport`	The transport the server is running: `stdio`, `sse` or `streamable-http`.	`stdio`
`flags`	The names of the command-line flags that were set. No flag values are sent.	`disable-write,transport`
`env_set`	The names of the configuration environment variables that are set. No free-form values are sent.	`GRAFANA_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN,GRAFANA_URL`
`enabled_tools`	The tool category names that are active.	`alerting,dashboard,search`
`disabled_tools`	The tool category names a `--disable-<category>` flag turned off.	`oncall`
`tls_enabled`	Whether the server is serving HTTPS (only the `streamable-http` transport does).	`false`
`metrics_enabled`	Whether the Prometheus `/metrics` endpoint is served.	`true`
`dynamic_multi_org`	Whether per-call organisation selection is enabled.	`false`
`proxied_enabled`	Whether proxied tools from external MCP servers are enabled.	`true`

Server-side enrichment

Reports are received by Grafana’s usage-stats service, the same service that receives usage reports from Grafana, Loki, Mimir and Tempo. On receipt, the service adds two pieces of information derived from the connection rather than from the event:

A coarse geographic region, for example, a country or subdivision, taken from headers added by the CDN edge.
The network organisation name from a whois lookup of the connecting IP address, which typically resolves to your ISP, your cloud provider or your employer’s network.

Inspect what would be sent

To inspect the report, set either the --usage-stats=log flag or the GRAFANA_USAGE_STATS=log environment variable. In this mode, the server prints each event to stderr and doesn’t send it:

GRAFANA_USAGE_STATS=log mcp-grafana

The server prints a report every four hours and on graceful shutdown. To inspect a report sooner, stop the server gracefully after you run the tool calls you want to inspect. If you run the server in a terminal, press Ctrl+C.

Under the stdio transport, stderr goes wherever your MCP client sends the server’s logs. Read the printed events there.

How the report is sent

Property	Value
Destination	`https://stats.grafana.org/mcp-grafana-usage-report`
Method	A single `POST` with the event as a JSON object
Attempts	One. A failed report is never retried and never stored.
Timing	Every four hours, and once more as the process exits
Time limit	One second for the shutdown report, so exit is never delayed longer than that

Because a failed report is never retried, and the counters reset when a report is built rather than when it arrives, a total summed across a process_id is a floor rather than an exact count. report_seq is how a missing report is identified.

To send reports somewhere else, set GRAFANA_USAGE_STATS_ENDPOINT to another URL. This changes the destination only; it is not an opt-out.

Opt out

Use one of the following controls. The --usage-stats flag overrides GRAFANA_USAGE_STATS, and both override DO_NOT_TRACK. Unrecognized mode values disable reporting. Only DO_NOT_TRACK=1 has an effect; other values don’t change the reporting mode.

The controls appear in order of precedence, highest first:

--usage-stats flag: set it to enabled, disabled or log.
shell
```
mcp-grafana --usage-stats=disabled
```
GRAFANA_USAGE_STATS environment variable: set it to enabled, disabled or log.
shell
```
export GRAFANA_USAGE_STATS=disabled
```
DO_NOT_TRACK environment variable: set it to 1 to disable reporting, following the cross-tool DO_NOT_TRACK convention.
shell
```
export DO_NOT_TRACK=1
```