Hosted Grafana: all customer-side users hardcoded to Editor role, can't add custom datasources

Questions / Help
,
1

Hi team,

In Fly’s hosted Grafana (fly-metrics.net), every customer-side user — including the org owner/creator — is stuck on Editor role, with no apparent way to elevate to Admin. This blocks adding custom datasources.

Setup

  • Org: myclawteam-146 (myClawTeam, shared)
  • I am Fly org Admin (verified in Dashboard → Team)
  • “Mike Tang” is the org owner/creator

Observed

Both Mike and I see the same in fly-metrics.net → profile dropdown:

​ Mike Tang → Editor myClawTeam → Editor Alex → Editor ​

Going to Connections → Add new connection → Loki shows:

:warning: Editors cannot add new connections. To add a new connection, contact your Grafana admin.

There appears to be no “Grafana admin” reachable from our side.

What I’m trying to do

I’m running my own Loki on Fly (zeroclaw-loki.internal:3100, Tigris S3 backend) for permanent log retention and would like to query it from the hosted Grafana, alongside the pre-provisioned Quickwit / VictoriaLogs / Prometheus datasources.

Questions

  1. Is the Editor-only restriction intentional (multi-tenant isolation)? — I assume yes, just want to confirm.
  2. Is there any supported escape hatch to add a custom datasource (Loki specifically, pointing at a .internal URL only)?
  3. If not, is this something Fly might consider as a feature request? Right now my workaround is to deploy zeroclaw-grafana separately (~$1.5/mo extra), which duplicates the Grafana you already host.

Thanks!
— Alex

2

I defer to employees here, but I would guess this is a fundamental limitation of managed Grafana. I would like to think you could create your own Grafana app, and point it to the backing store that Fly uses (Prometheus?) so you have more control over how it works. It sounds like this is your point 3, and that’s certainly how I’d tackle it for now.

3

we don’t have any plans to support custom datasources in hosted grafana at the moment; I’m not sure it would be able to work at all, since fly-metrics is multitenant.

5

Hi Alex!

You’re correct, the Editor-only restriction is intentional.

When you need to get more from Grafana than the hosted solution offers, the recommended approach is to setup a custom instance.

We have a project at https://github.com/superfly/fly-telemetry that’s a good starting point.