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Google Sheets

Google Sheets: Spreadsheet data in dashboards

What it’s for: Human-maintained data including on-call schedules, manual logs, budgets, and targets.

Trade-offs

ProsCons
Non-technical users can updateRequires Google authentication
Real-time collaborationSheet size limits
Familiar interfaceNot for high-volume data
Easy data entryAPI rate limits

Best for

  • On-call schedules
  • Manual tracking and logs
  • Application targets and KPIs
  • Data non-engineers maintain

Tip: Use named ranges for stable queries as sheets evolve.

Documentation

View the full documentation. Learning path coming soon!

Google Sheets data source

Script

Here’s a data source that surprises people: Google Sheets. Why would you want spreadsheet data in Grafana? Because lots of important data lives in spreadsheets maintained by non-technical users. On-call schedules. Budget targets. Manual incident tracking. Application KPIs that someone updates weekly.

With the Google Sheets data source, that data shows up in your dashboards alongside your technical metrics. Your operations manager updates the budget spreadsheet, and your dashboard automatically reflects the changes.

The interface is familiar. Just reference cells or named ranges, and Google handles the collaboration features. For combining human-maintained data with automated telemetry, Google Sheets is genuinely useful.

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