Templates and variables on Grafana Labs

Variable syntax

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 04:37:32 +0000

Variable syntax

Panel titles and metric queries can refer to variables using two different syntaxes:

$varname This syntax is easy to read, but it does not allow you to use a variable in the middle of a word. Example: apps.frontend.$server.requests.count
${var_name} Use this syntax when you want to interpolate a variable in the middle of an expression.
${var_name:<format>} This format gives you more control over how Grafana interpolates values. Refer to Advanced variable format options for more detail on all the formatting types.
[[varname]] Do not use. Deprecated old syntax, will be removed in a future release.

Before queries are sent to your data source the query is interpolated, meaning the variable is replaced with its current value. During interpolation, the variable value might be escaped in order to conform to the syntax of the query language and where it is used. For example, a variable used in a regex expression in an InfluxDB or Prometheus query will be regex escaped. Read the data source specific documentation topic for details on value escaping during interpolation.

For advanced syntax to override data source default formatting, refer to Advanced variable format options.

Manage variables

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Manage variables

The variables page lets you add variables and manage existing variables. It also allows you to inspect variables and identify whether a variable is being referenced (or used) in other variables or dashboard.

Move

You can move a variable up or down the list using the up and down arrows respectively.

Clone

To clone a variable, click the clone icon from the set of icons on the right. This creates a copy of the variable with the name of the original variable prefixed with copy_of_.

Delete

To delete a variable, click the trash icon from the set of icons on the right.

Inspect variables

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Inspect variables and their dependencies

The variables page lets you easily identify whether a variable is being referenced (or used) in other variables or dashboard. In addition, you can also add variables and manage existing variables from this page.

Note: This feature is available in Grafana 7.4 and later versions.

Any variable that is referenced or used has a green check mark next to it, while unreferenced variables have a orange caution icon next to them.

In addition, all referenced variables have a dependency icon next to the green check mark. You can click on the icon to view the dependency map. The dependency map can be moved. You can zoom in out with mouse wheel or track pad equivalent.

Add variables

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Variables types

Grafana uses several types of variables.

Variable type	Description
Query	Query-generated list of values such as metric names, server names, sensor IDs, data centers, and so on. Add a query variable.
Custom	Define the variable options manually using a comma-separated list. Add a custom variable.
Text box	Display a free text input field with an optional default value. Add a text box variable.
Constant	Define a hidden constant. Add a constant variable.
Data source	Quickly change the data source for an entire dashboard. Add a data source variable.
Interval	Interval variables represent time spans. Add an interval variable.
Ad hoc filters	Key/value filters that are automatically added to all metric queries for a data source (InfluxDB, Prometheus, and Elasticsearch only). Add ad hoc filters.
Global variables	Built-in variables that can be used in expressions in the query editor. Refer to Global variables.
Chained variables	Variable queries can contain other variables. Refer to Chained variables.

Variable examples

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Variable examples

This page contains links to dashboards in Grafana Play with examples of template variables.

Elasticsearch Metrics - Uses ad hoc filters, global variables, and a custom variable.
Graphite Templated Nested - Uses query variables, chained query variables, an interval variable, and a repeated panel.
Influx DB Group By Variable - Query variable, panel uses the variable results to group the metric data.
InfluxDB Raw Query Template Var - Uses query variables, chained query variables, and an interval variable.
InfluxDB Server Monitoring - Uses query variables, chained query variables, an interval variable, and an ad hoc filter.
Prometheus templating - Uses chained query variables.
Template Redux - Uses query variables, chained query variables, ad hoc filters, an interval variable, a text box variable, a custom variable, and a data source variable.
Templating, repeated panels - Two sets of repeated panels use query variables.
Templating showcase - Uses custom, query, chained query, and data source variables.
Templating value groups - Uses query variable with value groups.

Variable selection options

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Configure variable selection options

Selection Options are a feature you can use to manage variable option selections. All selection options are optional, and they are off by default.

Multi-value

If you turn this on, then the variable dropdown list allows users to select multiple options at the same time. For more information, refer to Formatting multi-value variables.

Include All option

Grafana adds an All option to the variable dropdown list. If a user selects this option, then all variable options are selected.

Custom all value

This option is only visible if the Include All option is selected.

Enter regex, globs, or lucene syntax in the Custom all value field to define the value of the All option.

By default the All value includes all options in combined expression. This can become very long and can have performance problems. Sometimes it can be better to specify a custom all value, like a wildcard regex.

In order to have custom regex, globs, or lucene syntax in the Custom all value option, it is never escaped so you will have to think about what is a valid value for your data source.

Variable value group tags

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Configure variable value group tags

Note: This is an experimental feature that will be deprecated in Grafana v8.

Value groups/tags are a feature you can use to organize variable options. If you have many options in the dropdown for a multi-value variable, then you can use this feature to group the values into selectable tags.

This feature is off by default. Click Enabled to turn the feature on.

To see an example, check out Templating value groups.

Tags query

Enter a data source query that should return a list of tags. The tags query returns a list of tags that each represents a group, and the tag values query returns a list of group members.

For example, the tags query could be a list of regions (Europe, Asia, Americas), and then if the user selects the Europe tag, then the tag values query would return a list of countries – Sweden, Germany, France, and so on.

If you have a variable with a lot of values (say all the countries in the world), then this allows you to easily select a group of them. If the user selects the tag Europe, all the countries in Europe would be selected.

In this example dashboard, the server variable has tags enabled.

Tag values query

Enter a data source query that should return a list of values for a specified tag key. Use $tag in the query to refer to the currently selected tag.

The $tag variable will have the value of the tag that the user chooses.

For example, if you have a Graphite query for tags, regions.*, that returns a list of regions. The values query could be regions.$tag.*, which if the user chooses Europe would be interpolated to regions.Europe.*.

Advanced variable format options

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Advanced variable format options

The formatting of the variable interpolation depends on the data source, but there are some situations where you might want to change the default formatting.

For example, the default for the MySql data source is to join multiple values as comma-separated with quotes: 'server01','server02'. In some cases, you might want to have a comma-separated string without quotes: server01,server02. You can make that happen with advanced variable formatting options listed below.

General syntax

Syntax: ${var_name:option}

Test the formatting options on the Grafana Play site.

If any invalid formatting option is specified, then glob is the default/fallback option.

An alternative syntax (that might be deprecated in the future) is [[var_name:option]].

CSV

Formats variables with multiple values as a comma-separated string.

servers = ['test1', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:csv}'
Interpolation result: 'test1,test2'

Distributed - OpenTSDB

Formats variables with multiple values in custom format for OpenTSDB.

servers = ['test1', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:distributed}'
Interpolation result: 'test1,servers=test2'

Doublequote

Formats single- and multi-valued variables into a comma-separated string, escapes " in each value by \" and quotes each value with ".

servers = ['test1', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:doublequote}'
Interpolation result: '"test1","test2"'

Glob - Graphite

Formats variables with multiple values into a glob (for Graphite queries).

servers = ['test1', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:glob}'
Interpolation result: '{test1,test2}'

JSON

Formats variables with multiple values as a comma-separated string.

servers = ['test1', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:json}'
Interpolation result: '["test1", "test2"]'

Lucene - Elasticsearch

Formats variables with multiple values in Lucene format for Elasticsearch.

servers = ['test1', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:lucene}'
Interpolation result: '("test1" OR "test2")'

Percentencode

Formats single and multi valued variables for use in URL parameters.

servers = ['foo()bar BAZ', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:percentencode}'
Interpolation result: 'foo%28%29bar%20BAZ%2Ctest2'

Pipe

Formats variables with multiple values into a pipe-separated string.

servers = ['test1.', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:pipe}'
Interpolation result: 'test1.|test2'

Raw

Turns off data source-specific formatting, such as single quotes in an SQL query.

servers = ['test.1', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${var_name:raw}'
Interpolation result: 'test.1,test2'

Regex

Formats variables with multiple values into a regex string.

servers = ['test1.', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:regex}'
Interpolation result: '(test1\.|test2)'

Singlequote

Formats single- and multi-valued variables into a comma-separated string, escapes ' in each value by \' and quotes each value with '.

servers = ['test1', 'test2']
String to interpolate: '${servers:singlequote}'
Interpolation result: "'test1','test2'"

Sqlstring

Formats single- and multi-valued variables into a comma-separated string, escapes ' in each value by '' and quotes each value with '.

servers = ["test'1", "test2"]
String to interpolate: '${servers:sqlstring}'
Interpolation result: "'test''1','test2'"

Text

Formats single- and multi-valued variables into their text representation. For a single variable it will just return the text representation. For multi-valued variables it will return the text representation combined with +.

servers = ["test1", "test2"]
String to interpolate: '${servers:text}'
Interpolation result: "test1 + test2"

Query parameters

Formats single- and multi-valued variables into their query parameter representation. Example: var-foo=value1&var-foo=value2

servers = ["test1", "test2"]
String to interpolate: '${servers:queryparam}'
Interpolation result: "var-servers=test1&var-servers=test2"

Multi-value variables

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Multi-value variables

Interpolating a variable with multiple values selected is tricky as it is not straight forward how to format the multiple values into a string that is valid in the given context where the variable is used. Grafana tries to solve this by allowing each data source plugin to inform the templating interpolation engine what format to use for multiple values.

Note: The Custom all value option on the variable must be blank for Grafana to format all values into a single string. If leave it blank, then the Grafana concatenates (adds together) all the values in the query. Something like value1,value2,value3. If a custom all value is used, then instead the value will be something like * or all.

Multi-value variables with a Graphite data source

Graphite uses glob expressions. A variable with multiple values would, in this case, be interpolated as {host1,host2,host3} if the current variable value was host1, host2, and host3.

Multi-value variables with a Prometheus or InfluxDB data source

InfluxDB and Prometheus use regex expressions, so the same variable would be interpolated as (host1|host2|host3). Every value would also be regex escaped. If not, a value with a regex control character would break the regex expression.

Multi-value variables with an Elastic data source

Elasticsearch uses lucene query syntax, so the same variable would be formatted as ("host1" OR "host2" OR "host3"). In this case, every value must be escaped so that the value only contains lucene control words and quotation marks.

Troubleshoot multi-value variables

Automatic escaping and formatting can cause problems and it can be tricky to grasp the logic behind it. Especially for InfluxDB and Prometheus where the use of regex syntax requires that the variable is used in regex operator context.

If you do not want Grafana to do this automatic regex escaping and formatting, then you must do one of the following:

Turn off the Multi-value or Include All option options.
Use the raw variable format.

Filter variables with regex

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Filter variables with regex

Using the Regex Query option, you filter the list of options returned by the variable query or modify the options returned.

This page shows how to use regex to filter/modify values in the variable dropdown.

Using the Regex Query Option, you filter the list of options returned by the Variable query or modify the options returned. For more information, refer to the Mozilla guide on Regular expressions.

Examples of filtering on the following list of options:

backend_01
backend_02
backend_03
backend_04

Filter so that only the options that end with `01` or `02` are returned:

Regex:

/.*[01|02]/

Result:

backend_01
backend_02

Filter and modify the options using a regex capture group to return part of the text:

Regex:

/.*(01|02)/

Result:

01
02

Filter and modify - Prometheus Example

List of options:

up{instance="demo.robustperception.io:9090",job="prometheus"} 1 1521630638000
up{instance="demo.robustperception.io:9093",job="alertmanager"} 1 1521630638000
up{instance="demo.robustperception.io:9100",job="node"} 1 1521630638000

Regex:

/.*instance="([^"]*).*/

Result:

demo.robustperception.io:9090
demo.robustperception.io:9093
demo.robustperception.io:9100

Filter and modify using named text and value capture groups

Note: This feature is available in Grafana 7.4+.

Using named capture groups, you can capture separate ’text’ and ‘value’ parts from the options returned by the variable query. This allows the variable drop-down list to contain a friendly name for each value that can be selected.

For example, when querying the node_hwmon_chip_names Prometheus metric, the chip_name is a lot friendlier that the chip value. So the following variable query result:

node_hwmon_chip_names{chip="0000:d7:00_0_0000:d8:00_0",chip_name="enp216s0f0np0"} 1
node_hwmon_chip_names{chip="0000:d7:00_0_0000:d8:00_1",chip_name="enp216s0f0np1"} 1
node_hwmon_chip_names{chip="0000:d7:00_0_0000:d8:00_2",chip_name="enp216s0f0np2"} 1
node_hwmon_chip_names{chip="0000:d7:00_0_0000:d8:00_3",chip_name="enp216s0f0np3"} 1

Passed through the following Regex:

/chip_name="(?<text>[^"]+)|chip="(?<value>[^"]+)/g

Would produce the following drop-down list:

Display Name          Value
------------          -------------------------
enp216s0f0np0         0000:d7:00_0_0000:d8:00_0
enp216s0f0np1         0000:d7:00_0_0000:d8:00_1
enp216s0f0np2         0000:d7:00_0_0000:d8:00_2
enp216s0f0np3         0000:d7:00_0_0000:d8:00_3

Note: Only text and value capture group names are supported.

Repeat panels or rows

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Repeat panels or rows

Grafana lets you create dynamic dashboards using template variables. All variables in your queries expand to the current value of the variable before the query is sent to the database. Variables let you reuse a single dashboard for all your services.

Template variables can be very useful to dynamically change your queries across a whole dashboard. If you want Grafana to dynamically create new panels or rows based on what values you have selected, you can use the Repeat feature.

Grafana Play examples

You can see examples in the following dashboards:

Repeating panels

If you have a variable with Multi-value or Include all value options enabled you can choose one panel and have Grafana repeat that panel for every selected value. You find the Repeat feature under the General tab in panel edit mode.

The direction controls how the panels will be arranged.

By choosing horizontal the panels will be arranged side-by-side. Grafana will automatically adjust the width of each repeated panel so that the whole row is filled. Currently, you cannot mix other panels on a row with a repeated panel.

Set Max per row to tell grafana how many panels per row you want at most. It defaults to 4 if you don’t set anything.

By choosing vertical the panels will be arranged from top to bottom in a column. The width of the repeated panels will be the same as of the first panel (the original template) being repeated.

Only make changes to the first panel (the original template). To have the changes take effect on all panels you need to trigger a dynamic dashboard re-build. You can do this by either changing the variable value (that is the basis for the repeat) or reload the dashboard.

Note: Repeating panels require variables to have one or more items selected; you cannot repeat a panel zero times to hide it.

Repeating rows

As seen above with the panels you can also repeat rows if you have variables set with Multi-value or Include all value selection option.

To enable this feature you need to first add a new Row using the Add Panel menu. Then by hovering the row title and clicking on the cog button, you will access the Row Options configuration panel. You can then select the variable you want to repeat the row for.

It may be a good idea to use a variable in the row title as well.

Templates and variables on Grafana Labs

Variable syntax

Variable syntax

Manage variables

Manage variables

Move

Clone

Delete

Inspect variables

Inspect variables and their dependencies

Add variables

Variables types

Variable examples

Variable examples

Variable selection options

Configure variable selection options

Multi-value

Include All option

Custom all value

Variable value group tags

Configure variable value group tags

Tags query

Tag values query

Advanced variable format options

Advanced variable format options

General syntax

CSV

Distributed - OpenTSDB

Doublequote

Glob - Graphite

JSON

Lucene - Elasticsearch

Percentencode

Pipe

Raw

Regex

Singlequote

Sqlstring

Text

Query parameters

Multi-value variables

Multi-value variables

Multi-value variables with a Graphite data source

Multi-value variables with a Prometheus or InfluxDB data source

Multi-value variables with an Elastic data source

Troubleshoot multi-value variables

Filter variables with regex

Filter variables with regex

Filter so that only the options that end with 01 or 02 are returned:

Filter and modify the options using a regex capture group to return part of the text:

Filter and modify - Prometheus Example

Filter and modify using named text and value capture groups

Repeat panels or rows

Repeat panels or rows

Grafana Play examples

Repeating panels

Repeating rows

Filter so that only the options that end with `01` or `02` are returned: