Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Grafana Live

Live Channel

Enterprise Open source

Grafana Live Channel guide

Grafana Live is a PUB/SUB server, clients subscribe to channels to receive real-time updates published to those channels.

Channel structure

Channel is a string identifier. In Grafana channel consists of 3 parts delimited by /:

Scope
Namespace
Path

For example, the channel grafana/dashboard/xyz has the scope grafana, namespace dashboard, and path xyz.

Scope, namespace and path can only have ASCII alphanumeric symbols (A-Z, a-z, 0-9), _ (underscore) and - (dash) at the moment. The path part can additionally have /, . and = symbols. The meaning of scope, namespace and path is context-specific.

The maximum length of a channel is 160 symbols.

Scope determines the purpose of a channel in Grafana. For example, for data source plugin channels Grafana uses ds scope. For built-in features like dashboard edit notifications Grafana uses grafana scope.

Namespace has a different meaning depending on scope. For example, for grafana scope this could be a name of built-in real-time feature like dashboard (i.e. dashboards events).

The path, which is the final part of a channel, usually contains the identifier of some concrete resource such as the ID of a dashboard that a user is currently looking at. But a path can be anything.

Channels are lightweight and ephemeral - they are created automatically on user subscription and removed as soon as last user left a channel.