InfluxDB templates

Instead of hard-coding things like server, application and sensor name in your metric queries you can use variables in their place.

For more information, refer to Templates and variables.

Using variables in InfluxDB queries

There are two syntaxes:

$<varname> Example:

SELECT mean("value") FROM "logins" WHERE "hostname" =~ /^$host$/ AND $timeFilter GROUP BY time($__interval), "hostname"

[[varname]] Example:

SELECT mean("value") FROM "logins" WHERE "hostname" =~ /^[[host]]$/ AND $timeFilter GROUP BY time($__interval), "hostname"

Why two ways? The first syntax is easier to read and write but does not allow you to use a variable in the middle of a word. When the Multi-value or Include all value options are enabled, Grafana converts the labels from plain text to a regex compatible string. Which means you have to use =~ instead of =.

Example dashboard: InfluxDB Templated Dashboard

Query variables

If you add a query template variable, then you can write an InfluxDB exploration (metadata) query. These queries can return things like measurement names, key names or key values. For more information, refer to Add query variable.

For example, you can have a variable that contains all values for tag hostname if you specify a query like this in the query variable Query.

SHOW TAG VALUES WITH KEY = "hostname"

Chained or nested variables

You can also create nested variables, sometimes called chained variables.

For example, if you had another variable, for example region. Then you could have the hosts variable only show hosts from the current selected region with a query like this:

SHOW TAG VALUES WITH KEY = "hostname"  WHERE region = '$region'

You can fetch key names for a given measurement.

SHOW TAG KEYS [FROM <measurement_name>]

If you have a variable with key names you can use this variable in a group by clause. This will allow you to change group by using the variable list at the top of the dashboard.

Ad hoc filters variable

InfluxDB supports the special Ad hoc filters variable type. This variable allows you to specify any number of key/value filters on the fly. These filters are automatically applied to all your InfluxDB queries.

For more information, refer to Add ad hoc filters.