upgrading.md

Upgrading Grafana while Retaining Data

How I upgrade Grafana. My development/testing environment runs Grafana on a Debian 11 desktop. The live/production version runs on Windows Server 2016.

Pre-upgrade Prep

Read the release note(s) on the downloads page to see if there's any ominous warnings of things that might break my install

• Backup your database (location varies depending on database engine your install uses)

Linux

1. Simply download the .deb
2. Follow the instructions (though I prefer to use apt install instead of dpkg -i)
3. Compare/diff grafana.ini with default.ini for new settings
4. Restart the Grafana server

   service grafana-server restart

5. Done.

Windows

Note that if you fail to stop the Grafana server before upgrading, you'll probably get a prompt to reboot the entire server to finish the upgrade!

1. Make a copy of C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\grafana\data\plugins on the desktop
2. Go to Services (services.msc) > Grafana > right-click > Stop
3. Download the .msi installer > run
4. Compare/diff custom.ini with default.ini for new settings
5. Go to Services (services.msc) > Grafana > right-click > Start
6. Done.