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Data sources, visualizations, and apps: A guide to extending and customizing Grafana

Data sources, visualizations, and apps: A guide to extending and customizing Grafana

2025-02-25 7 min

Grafana’s extensibility has always been one of the keys to its success. It comes with a wide range of data sources that allow you to query your data no matter where it lives, visualizations to help you quickly make sense of that data, and apps that can provide complete observability solutions, all in a single package.

Beyond these built-in capabilities, we have a broad ecosystem of plugins, extending Grafana’s reach even further and enabling a wide range of use cases — from monitoring an application running in a Kubernetes cluster to visualizing the position of the sun and moon.

In this blog post, we’ll help you understand how you can extend Grafana with plugins. We’ll provide an overview of the three main plugin types, plugin signature levels, and how to find what you need in our catalog. In the end, you’ll walk away with a clearer understanding of the Grafana plugin ecosystem, and how you can start using plugins today to build out your observability strategy.

Types of Grafana plugins

A plugin is a component that extends Grafana by adding new ways to query and visualize data. They help you customize Grafana based on your unique observability needs.

There are three main types of Grafana plugins:

  1. Data sources
  2. Panels (visualizations)
  3. Apps
A diagram of the three Grafana plugin types.

Let’s take a closer look at each.

1. Data sources

Data source plugins communicate with external sources of data and return that data in a format that Grafana understands. By adding a data source plugin, you can instantly use data from that source in any of your existing Grafana dashboards.

For example, you can use a data source plugin to query data from databases such as MongoDB or Google BigQuery

A screenshot of a dashboard for the MongoDB data source.
The MongoDB data source.

To learn more about how data sources work, please refer to our technical documentation.

2. Panels 

Panel plugins allow you to add new types of visualizations, such as the button panel, to your Grafana dashboard. They can work in partnership with a data source to help you visualize returned data, or can be completely independent widgets, such as the text panel.

A screenshot of the button panel.
The button panel.

To learn more about how to use panels, refer to our panels and visualizations docs.

3. Apps 

App plugins, at their most basic, can be used to bundle new data sources, visualizations, and dashboards into a single installable package to simplify getting started. But they can go beyond this, adding custom pages within Grafana that can include rich, dynamic dashboards powered by our Scenes framework. They can also add new capabilities — for example, declaring an incident from within a dashboard panel menu — to parts of Grafana through UI extensions.

A screenshot of how to declare an incident from within a panel.
Example of available extensions from a dashboard panel menu.

You can also use app plugins, such as Zabbix and Azure Cloud Native Monitoring, to quickly get started with monitoring these systems. Below is an example of our Kubernetes monitoring app, showing an overview of your cluster.

A screenshot of a Kubernetes monitoring dashboard.
An app for monitoring Kubernetes.

Signature levels

All Grafana plugins are digitally signed to ensure they have not been tampered with, and are classified under different signature levels. This signature level indicates who the author of the plugin is, how it is supported, and how the plugin can be distributed.

There are five signature levels:

  1. Grafana
  2. Enterprise
  3. Community
  4. Commercial
  5. Private
A diagram showing plugin signature levels.

Let’s break down the differences between them and what they signify.

1. Grafana

Plugins with the Grafana signature level are developed and maintained by Grafana Labs. We can break down this category of plugins into two sub-categories: core and external plugins.

Grafana ships with a set of data sources and visualizations available by default. These are referred to as “core” plugins, and examples include the time series panel and PostgreSQL data source.

A screenshot of a dashboard for the PostgreSQL data source.
The PostgreSQL data source.

2. Enterprise

There are also additional data sources available as Grafana Enterprise plugins, which are included in Grafana Enterprise or can be purchased alongside Grafana Cloud. They are also available in the Grafana Cloud free tier so that anyone can easily try them out. Some examples of Enterprise plugins are Jira, Cloudflare, and Databricks.

A screenshot of a dashboard for the Cloudflare data source.
The Cloudflare data source.

3. Community

Grafana has a vibrant open source community, and this extends to our plugin ecosystem.  Community plugins are typically developed and maintained by individuals using Grafana for their own work or even hobbies; they are open source, and are distributed within the plugin catalog so you can easily add them to your Grafana instance. Some popular Community plugins are the Prometheus AlertManager data source and Business Charts panel.

A screenshot of panels for the AlertManager data source.
The Prometheus AlertManager data source.

4. Commercial (also known as Partner)

Commercial plugins provide integrations for third-party services, and are developed and supported by the vendor of that service.

Some examples of Commercial plugins are the Google Cloud Logging data source, the Embrace app, and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Metrics data source.

A screenshot of the Google Cloud Logging data source.
The Google Cloud Logging data source.

Note: If you’re a potential partner who wants to learn more about publishing a Commercial data source, please reach out at integrations@grafana.com.

5. Private

You can also create custom plugins using our developer tools for use on your own Grafana instance to, for example, connect to an in-house proprietary database. These are referred to as Private plugins. They are not published in the Grafana plugin catalog and cannot be installed in Grafana Cloud.

Support matrix

Now that we’ve outlined the different Grafana plugin types and their signature levels, let’s take a look at how they’re supported.

The following table maps the various plugin signature levels to their specific types of support:

SignatureOwnerAvailable in the catalogSupport
Grafana / EnterpriseGrafana LabsYesGrafana Labs (complete support for core, external, and Enterprise)
CommunityDeveloperYesOpen source community developer/users
CommercialPartnerYesPartner
PrivateDeveloperNoDeveloper

Note: To learn more about these levels of support for Grafana plugins, please refer to our Plugins policy.

All plugins with the Grafana signature level are officially supported by Grafana Labs. This means customers can contact our support team for assistance, and anyone can use our official​​ GitHub repository to report any issues, bugs, and feature requests.

Community plugins are not maintained or created by Grafana Labs, as they are developed by members of our open source community. To report any issues or make requests, you should reference the instructions on the plugin page in our plugin catalog. You can also ask questions on our official Community Forum or Community Slack. There are many ways to show support for Community plugins, such as starring the GitHub repository, contributing via pull requests, or via GitHub sponsorships.

For Commercial plugins, you need to directly contact the vendor who owns the plugin to report issues or make requests.

Where to find plugins

The easiest place to discover and install plugins is from within Grafana itself. Administrators can navigate to the plugins catalog to browse available data sources, visualizations (panels), and apps.

A screenshot of the plugin catalog within Grafana.
The plugin catalog within Grafana.

The catalog shows you which plugins you already have installed, where there are available updates, and other key insights such as when a plugin has been deprecated, as it is no longer maintained.

The catalog is also available on our website so anyone can browse available plugins.

Next steps

Ready to start extending Grafana? Sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account (if you don’t already have one) to start exploring the possibilities today!

If you have published a Grafana plugin, or use a plugin for a specific use case, and want to share your story with the broader community, we’d love to hear from you. Please email stories@grafana.com and provide a brief overview of your proposed topic and any relevant details. Your insights are not only useful for fellow Grafana users, but also provide the Grafana Labs team with vital information related to future improvements.

Thank you for following along, and hope to hear from you soon!

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