Software development

All about plugins: Building your first panel plugin

Check out our free trial, or sign up for a demo and talk to the team directly. Grafana recently released @grafana/create-, which will eventually replace the plugin development parts of @grafana/toolkit. You can see in the code, how to get information from the setting JSONData, remember that there are two parts to the backend data source configuration, this is the unsecured part. Another thing is how a session is created once and is kept for future use. In this tutorial you created a backend for your data source plugin.

Now we need to change the query method to read the results from the CQL connection. The newDataSourceInstance needs to use the host from the backend configuration. The latest version of grafana runtime holds the TemplateSrv that can be used to fetch available template variables. Note that defaultQuery is the place to add default values for your input. Restart Grafana and make sure that now you have the plugin configured.

Package a plugin

Dashboards are a set of panels organized in a grid with a set of variables (for example, server name). By changing the variables, you can change the data that is displayed on the dashboard, like show data from two separate servers. All dashboards can be customized, you can set the composition of the panels and their layout. There are many dashboards developed by the Grafana or community for different types and sources of data.

grafana plugin development

Christine Wang is a Solutions Engineer at Grafana Labs, where she brings the people element to technical integrations. After joining her first tech startup almost 12 years ago, she’s worked in a variety of user-centric roles for SaaS, ad tech, developer platform, and data companies. When she’s not evangelizing why everyone should use Grafana, you can find her making curry stew every Thursday night and browsing Ikea’s online catalogue for the fifth time this week. A more realistic use case would be to fetch data from an external API.

Develop a Grafana plugin

To change the option from the panel editor, you need to bind the color option to an option control. The PanelProps interface exposes runtime information about the panel, such as panel dimensions, and the current time range. To see all the available configuration settings for the plugin.json, refer to https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ the plugin.json Schema. To discover plugins, Grafana scans a plugin directory, the location of which depends on your operating system. If you are a Grafana plugin developer or want to become one, this plugin developer’s guide contains the tutorials and reference materials to help you get started.

  • From time to time, Grafana will offer additions of services, messages, and fields in the latest version of the plugin protocol.
  • This section contains documentation related to the key concepts for Grafana plugin development.
  • It deals with additional features on managing multiple types of graphs for different time series data using flexible visual settings to design attractive dashboards.
  • A plugin’s health check endpoint is exposed in the Grafana HTTP API and allows external systems to continuously poll the plugin’s health to make sure that it’s running and working as expected.
  • In the rest of the post, I will cover multiple subjects that were not clear to me while developing the backend plugin.

This plugin facilitates the automated monitoring of infrastructure assets in the IT landscape. An integrated view of the performance of all infra assets is provided by the Grafana dashboard using the inputs provided by this plugin. Sensu provides abundant data on the performance of infra resources such as Client data, event metrics, and results in Grafana to analyze and present insights to users.

How We Built Our Grafana Datasource Plugin for Cloud Dependency Monitoring

The Build a Plugin documentation provided by Grafana is a great place to start for anyone looking to build out a Grafana plugin. Grafana Team did some improvements in the tools and added deprecated messaging to the Grafana Toolkit. The data for this page will be grafana plugin development automatically collected from your Readme.md, Changelog.md, and the plugin.json file with the plugin description. Amnon has 15 years of experience in software development of large scale systems. Previously he worked at Convergin, which was acquired by Oracle.

grafana plugin development

We specialize in creating plugins that enable you to visualize your data on the Grafana platform. We will migrate our plugins to Grafana tools for Grafana 10 release. JavaScript or TypeScript can be used as the programming language (we chose TypeScript for our plugin). In the repository there is a large number of starter packs (there’s even an experimental example of the plugin on React) with pre-installed and pre-configured crawlers.

Grafana Plugins

These plugin software components may either be built by Grafana or developed by third-party developers or built by the internal team and these plugins are interfaced with main Grafana software. End users would be able to generate complex dashboards interactively using query builders and plugins. These plugins reduce the size and load of the main application and simplify the license administration. It allows you to build your own front-end application inside Grafana. Create your own pages and access datasources for data visualization, or work with the API directly, of course. A backend plugin can collect and return runtime, process, and custom metrics using the text-based Prometheus exposition format.

Today, he’s a Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs, where he helps professionals become better at understanding and monitoring software systems. Add support for custom queries to your data source, by implementing your own query editor, a React component that enables users to build their own queries, through a user-friendly graphical interface. Plugins enable Grafana to accomplish specialized tasks, custom-tailored to your requirements. By making a plugin for your organization, you can connect Grafana to other data sources, ticketing tools, and CI/CD tooling. Grafana is an open source web tool to provide dashboards from time series data for (among other things) monitoring purposes. What we ultimately wanted was for Metrist customers to be able to have the same tailored experience they would get with other Datasource plugins in Grafana.

Hosted infrastructure monitoring and visualization

In development I use Docker for running Grafana (I’m also going to use Docker for ScyllaDB). I suggest you would add two scripts to start and stop Grafana in Docker. See Percona’s recent news coverage, press releases and industry recognition for our open source software and support. The following github workflow example can be used in your project to keep an eye on the compatibility of your plugin and the grafana API.

In practice, the im variable inside SampleDatasource can generate new connections when needed. As you can see, applyTemplateVariables allows you to modify the values before they are sent. So far we took care of the frontend side, it’s time to move to the backend with go. In general, you need to explicitly do the variable replacement before sending the query to the backend plugin. Grafana supports template variables, those variables can be set explicitly or taken from a metric. This is the file that controls how the query editor looks and behaves.

What Will I Need to Start Development?

This means that you’ll get the same graph no matter what time range you’re using. In practice, you’d instead use the timestamps returned by your database. Now, when you change the color in the panel editor, the fill color of the circle changes as well. You’ve added a new option and a corresponding control to change the value. Grafana supports a range of option controls, such as text inputs, switches, and radio groups.