Last modified July 30, 2025

Creating a Grafana organization

This guide walks you through creating and configuring Grafana organizations to implement multi-tenancy in your observability platform.

Prerequisites

Before creating your organization, make sure you have:

• Access to the management cluster, where you can create custom resources
• Identified the tenant names you want to use
• Configured groups for RBAC in your identity provider

Understanding default organizations

Before creating your own organizations, it’s helpful to know about the two that already exist:

• Shared Org: Your starting point with system dashboards and platform metrics (uses giantswarm tenant)
• Giant Swarm: Internal organization for platform operations (Giant Swarm staff only)

Your organizations will appear alongside the Shared Org in the organization dropdown. Learn more about these in our multi-tenancy overview.

Creating a Grafana organization

Create a GrafanaOrganization custom resource in the management cluster:

Basic example

This example shows a simple organization for a single application with role-based access for different teams:

apiVersion: observability.giantswarm.io/v1alpha1
kind: GrafanaOrganization
metadata:
  name: myonlineshop
spec:
  displayName: MyOnlineShop
  rbac:
    admins:
    - customer:platform-admin
    - customer:ops-team
    editors:
    - customer:development-team
    - customer:devops-team
    viewers:
    - customer:marketing-team
    - customer:business-analysts
  tenants:
  - myonlineshop

Configuration options

Advanced examples

Multi-environment organization:

This example demonstrates an organization that manages multiple environments with hierarchical access control:

apiVersion: observability.giantswarm.io/v1alpha1
kind: GrafanaOrganization
metadata:
  name: engineering-team
spec:
  displayName: Engineering Team
  rbac:
    admins:
    - customer:engineering-leads
    editors:
    - customer:senior-engineers
    - customer:devops-team
    viewers:
    - customer:junior-engineers
    - customer:qa-team
  tenants:
  - prod-frontend
  - prod-backend
  - staging-frontend
  - staging-backend

Production-only organization:

This example shows a restricted organization with access only to production data:

apiVersion: observability.giantswarm.io/v1alpha1
kind: GrafanaOrganization
metadata:
  name: production-monitoring
spec:
  displayName: Production Monitoring
  rbac:
    admins:
    - customer:sre-team
    - customer:platform-admin
    viewers:
    - customer:engineering-team
    - customer:support-team
  tenants:
  - production

RBAC configuration

The RBAC section maps identity provider groups to Grafana organization roles:

Group format

Most Giant Swarm installations use Dex as the identity provider. Specify groups using the format {dex-connector-id}:{group-name}:

rbac:
  admins:
  - customer:platform-admin        # Maps 'platform-admin' group from 'customer' connector
  - customer:ops-team
  editors:
  - customer:development-team
  viewers:
  - customer:support-team

Finding your connector ID: Check your cluster’s Dex configuration for the connector ID (usually customer).

Required fields: admins is mandatory; editors and viewers are optional.

What happens when you create an organization

Creating a GrafanaOrganization resource automatically provisions:

1. New Grafana organization with your specified display name
2. Tenant-scoped datasources for Loki, Mimir, and Alertmanager
3. User role assignments based on your RBAC configuration
4. Data collection of alerts, metrics and logs

Verification steps

After creating your organization:

1. Check organization status:

kubectl get grafanaorganization myonlineshop -o yaml
2. [**Log in to Grafana**](/overview/observability/data-management/data-exploration/) and verify:


- The organization dropdown menu on the top-left corner shows all expected organizations

![Switching organization](./organization_switching.png)

- You can [explore and query data](/overview/observability/data-management/data-exploration/) for each of your tenants
- Logged-in users have appropriate role assignments under the `Administration / Users and access / Users` section