Grafana ships with built-in support for Google Stackdriver. Just add it as a datasource and you are ready to build dashboards for your Stackdriver metrics. It is only available in Grafana 5.3+. The datasource is currently a beta feature and is subject to change.
> NOTE: If you're not seeing the `Data Sources` link in your side menu it means that your current user does not have the `Admin` role for the current organization.
### Service Account Credentials - Private Key File
To authenticate with the Stackdriver API, you need to create a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Service Account for the Project you want to show data for. A Grafana datasource integrates with one GCP Project. If you want to visualize data from multiple GCP Projects then you need to create one datasource per GCP Project.
4. Some new fields will appear. Fill in a name for the service account in the `Service account name` field and then choose the `Monitoring Viewer` role from the `Role` dropdown:
5. Click the Create button. A JSON key file will be created and downloaded to your computer. Store this file in a secure place as it allows access to your Stackdriver data.
To add a filter, click the plus icon and choose a field to filter by and enter a filter value e.g. `instance_name = grafana-1`
### Aggregation
The aggregation field lets you combine time series based on common statistics. Read more about this option [here](https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/charts/metrics-selector#aggregation-options).
The `Aligner` field allows you to align multiple time series after the same group by time interval. Read more about how it works [here](https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/charts/metrics-selector#alignment).
The `Alignment Period` groups a metric by time if an aggregation is chosen. The default is to use the GCP Stackdriver default groupings (which allows you to compare graphs in Grafana with graphs in the Stackdriver UI).
The option is called `Stackdriver auto` and the defaults are:
The other automatic option is `Grafana auto`. This will automatically set the group by time depending on the time range chosen and the width of the graph panel. Read more about the details [here](http://docs.grafana.org/reference/templating/#the-interval-variable).
It is also possible to choose fixed time intervals to group by, like `1h` or `1d`.
Group by resource or metric labels to reduce the number of time series and to aggregate the results by a group by. E.g. Group by instance_name to see an aggregated metric for a Compute instance.
The Alias By field allows you to control the format of the legend keys. The default is to show the metric name and labels. This can be long and hard to read. Using the following patterns in the alias field, you can format the legend key the way you want it.
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 `=`.
## Annotations
[Annotations]({{< relref "reference/annotations.md" >}}) allows you to overlay rich event information on top of graphs. You add annotation
queries via the Dashboard menu / Annotations view.
## Configure the Datasource with Provisioning
It's now possible to configure datasources using config files with Grafana's provisioning system. You can read more about how it works and all the settings you can set for datasources on the [provisioning docs page](/administration/provisioning/#datasources)
Here is a provisioning example for this datasource.
