Telemetry
The Telemetry section of Meshery lets you view your observability data without leaving Meshery. It connects to the Grafana and Prometheus instances you have already registered as Connections and renders their data natively inside the Meshery UI.
Telemetry is organized into two modes, available as items under the Telemetry entry in the Meshery navigation:
- Charts — Browse, pin, and render your existing Grafana dashboards. See Grafana Dashboards.
- Metrics — Explore Prometheus metrics, compose PromQL queries, and save your own panels. See Prometheus Metrics.
How it works
Telemetry is connection-driven. Instead of pasting a URL and API key into a settings form, you register Grafana and Prometheus as Meshery Connections (with an associated Credential), and Telemetry uses them. This means:
- Credentials are stored once, securely, and reused — Meshery proxies every query server-side, so your browser never needs direct access to Grafana or Prometheus.
- The same connection can be shared across an Environment and reused by other Meshery features.
- Your pinned dashboards and saved metric panels are stored on the connection itself, so they persist and travel with it.
Telemetry derives the authentication scheme from the connection’s credential secret automatically: a value containing a colon (e.g. user:password) is treated as HTTP Basic auth, any other non-empty value is sent as a Bearer token (Grafana API key or Prometheus bearer token), and an empty secret is treated as anonymous access.
Prerequisites
Before using Telemetry, register at least one Grafana or Prometheus connection:
- Create a Credential holding your Grafana API key / service-account token, or your Prometheus token (if your Prometheus requires authentication).
- Register the connection of kind Grafana or Prometheus, pointing at the instance URL and selecting the credential.
Once a connection reaches the Connected or Registered state, it becomes selectable in the Telemetry connection picker.
Shared controls
Both Telemetry modes share a common set of controls:
- Connection picker — choose which registered Grafana/Prometheus connection to view.
- Connection status — a live indicator pings the connection and shows whether it is reachable, along with the detected server version.
- Time range — a relative time-range selector (from the last 5 minutes up to the last 7 days) applied to every panel.
- Refresh — refresh on demand, or set an auto-refresh interval.
All panels on a board or grid are loaded in a single batched request per refresh, keeping the view responsive even with many panels.
- Grafana Dashboards - Browse, pin, and render your existing Grafana dashboards inside Meshery using a registered Grafana connection.
- Prometheus Metrics - Explore Prometheus metrics, compose PromQL queries with live preview, and save your own panels — all from a registered Prometheus connection.