Automate Your Dashboards: Convert Prometheus Metrics to Grafana with AI

If you've ever set up monitoring for your applications, you know the drill: you've got Prometheus collecting metrics, but now you need to actually make sense of them. That means building Grafana dashboards and configuring alert rules—which can be surprisingly time-consuming, especially when you're dealing with dozens of metrics across multiple services.

What if you could automate that process? That's exactly what prom2grafana does. This clever tool uses AI to analyze your Prometheus metrics and automatically generate ready-to-use Grafana dashboards and alerting rules. It's like having a monitoring expert who works at machine speed.

What It Does

prom2grafana is a command-line tool that connects to your Prometheus instance, examines your metrics, and uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to generate Grafana dashboard JSON and Prometheus alerting rules. Instead of manually figuring out which metrics matter and how to visualize them, you get production-ready configurations in minutes.

The tool intelligently analyzes metric names, types, and labels to determine what's worth monitoring and how to best display it. It creates meaningful visualizations for different metric types—counters get rate calculations, histograms get percentile breakdowns, and gauges get appropriate aggregations.

Why It's Cool

The magic here isn't just in the AI—it's in the practical implementation. The tool understands Prometheus semantics and Grafana best practices. It doesn't just dump every metric into a dashboard; it creates logical groupings based on metric prefixes and labels, making the resulting dashboards actually useful.

What's particularly smart is how it handles alerting. The AI suggests sensible thresholds and conditions based on metric behavior rather than arbitrary values. For example, it might notice a counter that's tracking errors and suggest an alert when the error rate spikes significantly above baseline.

The implementation is straightforward Python with clear separation between the Prometheus data collection, AI analysis, and Grafana configuration generation. It's the kind of tool that feels obvious once you see it, but someone had to actually build it.

How to Try It

Getting started is pretty simple:

git clone https://github.com/mr-karan/prom2grafana
cd prom2grafana
pip install -r requirements.txt

You'll need to set your OpenAI API key and Prometheus URL:

export OPENAI_API_KEY='your-key-here'
export PROMETHEUS_URL='http://your-prometheus:9090'

Then run it against your metrics:

python main.py

The tool will generate JSON files for dashboards and alert rules that you can directly import into Grafana and Prometheus. There's also a dry-run mode if you want to see what it would generate without actually creating the files.

Final Thoughts

As developers, we often spend more time building monitoring than we'd like to admit. prom2grafana feels like cheating in the best way possible—it automates the repetitive parts of dashboard creation while still giving you sensible, production-ready results.

Is it perfect? Probably not for every use case, but it's an incredible starting point. You'll likely want to tweak the generated dashboards and alerts, but having that 80% solution automatically generated is huge. This is especially valuable when onboarding to new codebases or dealing with services you didn't originally build.

Give it a shot on your next monitoring project—you might be surprised how much time it saves you.

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