Grafana announcement banner: inform every user

1. What is the banner for? #

A message everyone sees.

The principle #

Available in: ✓ OSS ✓ Enterprise ✓ Cloud Grafana 11.3 and later; self-managed requires the notificationBanner feature toggle

The announcement banner shows a message at the top of every Grafana page, for all users in the organization: planned maintenance, migration to a new URL, an ongoing incident on a data source, a usage rule reminder. Only one banner is active at a time.

2. Enable and configure #

Feature toggle, form and permissions.

Enable the feature #

On Grafana Cloud, the banner is available out of the box. Self-managed (Grafana 11.3 and later), enable the notificationBanner feature toggle and restart Grafana.

[feature_toggles]
notificationBanner = true

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 -e GF_FEATURE_TOGGLES_ENABLE=notificationBanner grafana/grafana:latest

The form #

Open Administration › General › Announcement banner, then fill in:

• Enabled: turns the banner on or off without losing its content.
• Message: the displayed text (see the next part).
• Variant: the colour by severity (info, warning, error).
• Starts / Ends: the display window, to schedule an announcement ahead and remove it automatically.
• Depending on the version, the option letting users dismiss the banner (Grafana 13.3 and later).

The preview at the top of the form shows the result before saving.

Permissions: by default only organization administrators manage the banner; with role-based access control (Enterprise and Cloud) you can delegate it to an operations team.

3. The Message field: Markdown and HTML #

Formatting the text.

Markdown #

The Message field accepts Markdown: bold, italics, links, inline code. It is the simplest way to add a link to a status page or a procedure.

**Maintenance Saturday 10–11 pm**: alerts may be delayed.
[See the status page](https://status.example.com)

HTML #

The field also accepts HTML for cases Markdown handles poorly: forced line break, combined formatting, a link with specific text. Grafana sanitizes the content: scripts and event attributes (onclick…) are stripped.

<b>Migration</b>: the new address is <a href="https://grafana.example.com">grafana.example.com</a>.<br>The old one will be shut down on <i>December 1st</i>.

Good practice: keep it to one or two lines: the banner takes space on every page. Put details behind a link.

Common mistake: pasting a long HTML block copied from an email: inline styles and images bloat the banner and render poorly in dark mode. Always test with the preview, in light and dark themes.

4. Automation and best practices #

API and recommended uses.

Through the API #

The banner is a Grafana API resource: a deployment pipeline can enable it when a maintenance starts and disable it at the end. The exact resource path depends on the version: look it up in the API documentation or in the browser network tab while saving the form.

# Example: capture the exact call in the network tab, then replay it with a service account token
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" \
  "$GRAFANA_URL/apis/<group>/<version>/namespaces/default/announcementbanners"

Best practices #

• Keep the banner for information that concerns everyone; for a single team, prefer a text panel in its dashboards.
• Always set an end date so a stale announcement does not stay displayed.
• Pick the variant by actual severity: a permanent red banner ends up ignored.
• State times with their time zone for distributed teams.