Skill

admin

Name: admin
Author: Grafana

manage Grafana Cloud accounts and RBAC

Published by Grafana Updated Jul 12

Covers Operations Auth Grafana Access Control

Description

Manage Grafana Cloud accounts — organizations, stacks, RBAC roles and assignments, SSO/SAML/OAuth/GitHub auth, service accounts for CI/CD, user invites, team membership, and API-driven provisioning. Creates stacks via the Cloud API, mints service-account tokens, applies role assignments, configures SSO providers, and provisions teams/folders/dashboards via Terraform. Use when managing Grafana Cloud access, configuring SSO/SAML/OAuth, setting up service accounts for Terraform/CI/CD, assigning RBAC roles, inviting users, managing multiple stacks or organizations, provisioning cloud resources via API or Terraform, or auditing admin actions — even when the user says "set up SSO", "create a stack", "make a service account", or "onboard a team" without explicitly saying "admin".

SKILL.md

Grafana Cloud Admin

Docs: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/account-management.md

Common Workflows

Setting up a new stack

# 1. Create the stack via Cloud API
curl -X POST https://grafana.com/api/instances \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <grafana-com-api-key>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "my-new-stack", "slug": "my-new-stack", "region": "us-east-0", "plan": "grafana-cloud-free"}'

# 2. Verify the stack is reachable (poll until 200)
until curl -fs https://my-new-stack.grafana.net/api/health > /dev/null; do sleep 2; done

# 3. Mint an admin service-account token (see § Service Accounts below)

# 4. Test the token
curl https://my-new-stack.grafana.net/api/org -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>"
# Returns 200 + org JSON → token works

Onboarding a team

Invite users via POST /api/org/invites (one curl per user — see references/api-reference.md § Stack API)
Create the team via POST /api/teams
Add each user via POST /api/teams/{teamId}/members
Assign an RBAC role to the team (see § RBAC below)
Verify: GET /api/teams/{teamId}/members returns the expected user list

Configuring SSO (Okta / SAML / GitHub)

Pick the provider config from references/sso.md and drop into grafana.ini
Restart Grafana
Always validate in an incognito window before announcing: see references/sso.md § Verifying SSO for the 5-step verification + role-mapping debug pattern

Deleting a stack (destructive)

# 1. Delete via Cloud API
curl -X DELETE https://grafana.com/api/instances/{id} \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <grafana-com-api-key>"

# 2. Verify the stack is gone (must return 404)
curl https://grafana.com/api/instances/{id} \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <grafana-com-api-key>"

If the GET still returns 200 after a few seconds, the delete didn't apply — re-check the stack ID and Cloud API key.

Organization and Stack Structure

Grafana Cloud Account
└── Organization (billing unit)
    ├── Stack 1 (prod)   → dedicated Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo URLs
    ├── Stack 2 (staging)
    └── Stack 3 (dev)

Organization: top-level account with billing, users, API keys, stacks
Stack: dedicated Grafana + LGTM instance with its own URLs and credentials

User Roles

Role	Scope	Permissions
Org Admin	Organization	Manage stacks, users, billing, API keys
Admin	Stack	Data sources, plugins, users, provisioning
Editor	Stack	Create/edit dashboards, alerts
Viewer	Stack	Read-only dashboards

RBAC

Define a custom role + assignment in provisioning YAML:

# provisioning/access-control/roles.yaml
apiVersion: 1
roles:
  - name: TeamDashboardEditor
    description: Edit dashboards within team folder
    permissions:
      - action: dashboards:read
        scope: folders:UID:team-folder
      - action: dashboards:write
        scope: folders:UID:team-folder
      - action: dashboards:create
        scope: folders:UID:team-folder

# provisioning/access-control/assignments.yaml
apiVersion: 1
roleAssignments:
  - roleName: TeamDashboardEditor
    users:
      - alice@example.com
      - bob@example.com
    teams:
      - platform-team

After committing the YAML and restarting Grafana, verify the role applied: GET /api/access-control/roles | jq '.[] | select(.name=="TeamDashboardEditor")'.

Service Accounts

Service accounts are the recommended way for programmatic access (CI/CD, Terraform, agents).

# 1. Create the service account
curl -X POST https://yourstack.grafana.net/api/serviceaccounts \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <admin-token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "terraform-provisioner", "role": "Admin", "isDisabled": false}'

# 2. Mint a token for it
curl -X POST https://yourstack.grafana.net/api/serviceaccounts/{id}/tokens \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <admin-token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "ci-token", "secondsToLive": 0}'

# 3. Verify the token works (test on a harmless endpoint)
curl https://yourstack.grafana.net/api/org \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <new-token>"
# 200 + org JSON → token works. Anything else → re-check role assignment in step 1.

Provisioning equivalent (YAML, declarative):

# provisioning/access-control/service_accounts.yaml
apiVersion: 1
serviceAccounts:
  - name: alloy-writer
    orgId: 1
    role: Editor
    tokens:
      - name: alloy-token

References

references/sso.md — OAuth / SAML / GitHub OAuth config + the 5-step SSO verification pattern + common failure modes
references/terraform.md — Terraform provider config + common resource patterns (teams, users, folders, dashboards) + drift troubleshooting
references/api-reference.md — full Cloud API + Stack API endpoint reference + audit-log queries

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