Managed Plugins

Grafana Cloud offers a fully managed experience for Grafana. However, for external plugins, customers must manage plugin version updates themselves. This creates extra maintenance overheard - and an unnecessary step in receiving important security patches, bug fixes or new features. This is why we are now introducing a new feature called Managed Plugins.

Managed Plugins replaces the manual update process, and instead automatically updates plugin versions for Grafana Cloud customers, as a more natural SaaS experience. This is available for a growing set of Grafana Labs created data source plugins which can be installed from the Catalog. Plugins built into Grafana already update as part of the Grafana server upgrades.

Other than having up to date plugins, the main difference for users is that we will now display “Managed by Grafana” as shown in the screenshot below, where specific plugin version information was previously displayed. This serves as a visual indicator and will be consistent across the grafana.com portal and the Catalog.

This feature will gradually roll out to all Grafana Cloud users with no action required. To request early access, please contact support.