Home Assistant Grafana: Build Stunning Smart Home Dashboards

Long-Term Trends

See how your energy usage changed month over month. Track whether your new insulation actually reduced heating costs. Spot patterns you never noticed in daily views.

Multi-Sensor Overlays

Plot indoor temperature, outdoor temperature, and heating runtime on the same chart. Correlate humidity spikes with window open/close events. Grafana makes comparisons easy.

Built-In Alerts

Set up alerts directly in Grafana when sensors go out of range. Get notified if your freezer temperature rises, or if your solar production drops below expected levels.

Wall Display Ready

Grafana's kiosk mode is perfect for wall-mounted tablets or old laptops turned into monitoring screens. Auto-rotating dashboards with dark themes look fantastic.

100% Free and Local

Grafana OSS is open source and completely free. Everything runs on your local network. No cloud subscriptions, no data leaving your home, no vendor lock-in.

Thousands of Plugins

The Grafana plugin ecosystem is massive. Worldmap panels, 3D charts, Plotly integration, clock panels, discrete status timelines, and hundreds more. If you can imagine it, there's probably a plugin for it.

Docker Compose snippet

services:
  influxdb:
    image: influxdb:1.8
    container_name: influxdb
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8086:8086"
    volumes:
      - ./influxdb/data:/var/lib/influxdb
    environment:
      - INFLUXDB_DB=homeassistant
      - INFLUXDB_HTTP_AUTH_ENABLED=true
      - INFLUXDB_ADMIN_USER=admin
      - INFLUXDB_ADMIN_PASSWORD=your_admin_password
      - INFLUXDB_USER=homeassistant
      - INFLUXDB_USER_PASSWORD=your_ha_password

  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    container_name: grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    volumes:
      - ./grafana/data:/var/lib/grafana
    environment:
      - GF_SECURITY_ALLOW_EMBEDDING=true
      - GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ENABLED=true
      - GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ORG_ROLE=Viewer
    depends_on:
      - influxdb

Then configure your configuration.yaml the same way, but use host: influxdb (the container name) or your server's IP address.

Energy Dashboard

Daily, weekly, and monthly energy consumption with cost overlays. Compare solar production vs grid consumption. Track per-device usage from smart plugs. Bar charts for daily totals, line graphs for real-time power draw.

Key panels: Stat (total kWh), Time series (power curve), Bar gauge (top consumers), Table (cost breakdown)

Climate Overview

Temperature and humidity across every room on a single screen. Overlay outdoor weather data. Spot rooms that are consistently too cold or too humid. Perfect for optimizing heating schedules and catching drafts.

Key panels: Time series (multi-room temp), Gauge (current per room), Heatmap (hourly patterns), Stat (min/max/avg)

Solar Production Monitor

Real-time solar production, daily yield, monthly totals, and year-over-year comparison. Self-consumption ratio, grid export tracking, and battery state of charge. Know exactly what your panels are earning you.

Key panels: Time series (production curve), Stat (daily yield), Bar chart (monthly comparison), Gauge (self-consumption %)

Battery Tracker

Monitor battery levels across all your Zigbee sensors, smart locks, and remotes. Sort by lowest battery. Track discharge rates to predict when each device needs a new battery, before it dies and stops reporting.

Key panels: Table (all batteries, sorted), Bar gauge (levels), Time series (discharge curves), Alert (below 20%)

System Health

CPU usage, memory, disk space, and database size of your Home Assistant server. Track HA restart events, integration load times, and Zigbee network quality. Catch performance issues before they become problems.

Key panels: Gauge (CPU/RAM/disk), Time series (load over time), Stat (uptime), Log panel (errors)

Air Quality Monitor

CO2, PM2.5, and VOC levels over time. Correlate air quality with ventilation habits, cooking events, or outdoor pollution. Set alerts for when CO2 exceeds 1000 ppm so you know exactly when to open a window.

Key panels: Time series (CO2/PM2.5), Stat (current readings), Threshold lines (WHO guidelines), Heatmap (daily patterns)

Average temperature per room (last 24h)

SELECT mean("value")
FROM "°C"
WHERE "entity_id" =~ /temperature/
  AND time > now() - 24h
GROUP BY time(30m), "entity_id"
FILL(previous)

Daily energy consumption (last 30 days)

SELECT spread("value")
FROM "kWh"
WHERE "entity_id" = 'sensor.total_energy'
  AND time > now() - 30d
GROUP BY time(1d)
FILL(none)

All battery levels (current)

SELECT last("value")
FROM "%"
WHERE "entity_id" =~ /battery/
  AND time > now() - 1h
GROUP BY "entity_id"

Power consumption heatmap (hourly average)

SELECT mean("value")
FROM "W"
WHERE "entity_id" = 'sensor.total_power'
  AND time > now() - 7d
GROUP BY time(1h)
FILL(0)

Enable embedding in Grafana

If using Docker, add these environment variables (already included in the Docker Compose above):

GF_SECURITY_ALLOW_EMBEDDING=true
GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ENABLED=true
GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ORG_ROLE=Viewer
GF_SECURITY_COOKIE_SAMESITE=disabled

For HAOS add-on, set these in the add-on's configuration tab under "env_vars."

Get the embed URL

Open any Grafana panel, click the title, select "Share," then choose the "Embed" tab. Copy the iframe URL. It looks something like:

http://YOUR_IP:3000/d-solo/abc123/
  energy?orgId=1&panelId=2
  &from=now-24h&to=now
  &theme=dark

Add to Home Assistant dashboard

Use a Webpage card (or the custom iframe-panel from HACS) in your HA dashboard. Paste the Grafana embed URL. Set the aspect ratio to match your panel. The Grafana chart now updates live inside your HA dashboard.

🎯 Filter your entities

Don't send everything to InfluxDB. Use the include filter in your InfluxDB config to select only the entities you actually want to graph. Sending all 500+ entities fills your database quickly and makes queries slow. Start with temperature, humidity, energy, and battery sensors. Add more as needed.

⏰ Set retention policies

InfluxDB can automatically delete old data. Create a retention policy like CREATE RETENTION POLICY "one_year" ON "homeassistant" DURATION 365d REPLICATION 1 DEFAULT. You can also use continuous queries to downsample old data: keep per-minute readings for 7 days, then switch to hourly averages for the rest of the year.

🌙 Use dark themes

Grafana's dark theme looks amazing on wall displays and matches most Home Assistant themes. Set it as the default in Grafana's settings, or append &theme=dark to embed URLs. For kiosk mode on wall tablets, add &kiosk to the URL to hide the top bar and sidebar.

Use variables for reusable dashboards

Grafana's template variables let you build one dashboard that works for all rooms. Create a variable that pulls entity IDs from InfluxDB, then use dropdown menus to switch between rooms or devices. One dashboard, infinite views.

💾 Back up your dashboards

Grafana dashboards are stored in its database, not in YAML files. Export them as JSON from the dashboard settings menu and save those files alongside your Home Assistant backups. If you're using Docker, the grafana/data volume contains everything.

🔌 Try these Grafana plugins

Worldmap Panel for showing sensor locations on a map. Discrete for timeline views of binary sensors (door open/closed history). Plotly for advanced 3D or scatter plots. Clock for adding a simple clock to your wall display. Install them from Grafana's plugin catalog.