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In part 1, I wrote a simple Clock Plugin. However, it’s too simple to be usable for most people. In this post, I will show how to make this plugin customizable and at the same time explain more about how plugins can hook into Grafana. To make the clock panel more usable, we should be able to: choose a 12 or 24 hour clock set the background color set the font size set date/time formats  Then after that we’ll add some more features.

People have been asking for a Clock Panel in Grafana so I thought I’d give it a try and at the same time show how to build plugins for Grafana. Grafana 3.0 introduces a new plugin system architecture and these plugins can be shared with everyone through Grafana.net. TL;DR If you just want a clock panel for Grafana then the finished Clock Panel plugin is here. Check out the current version of the code on GitHub here.

Grafana Live, New in Grafana v3.0. Over the last few months, the Grafana Labs team has been working extremely hard on the latest version of Grafana, adding not only UI and UX improvements, but some exciting new features and functionality. Many of these features are centered around a new plugin architecture which allows anyone to easily integrate external systems directly into Grafana, and share these integrations with the entire community through a new service called Grafana.

Ever Since Grafana 2.0 was released with its own backend, we’ve added many ways to help you board and authenticate users. It’s easy to use Grafana as a hub to invite and manage users across multiple Organizations. We’ve also added LDAP support to allow for external authentication. But what if you want to do something else? SSO? TACACS? ActiveDirectory? Something custom that you’re running already? Would the new backend make it hard for those use cases?