Grafana Plugins

Grafana's core features cover most monitoring needs, but plugins extend those capabilities further. A plugin adds a new panel type, a new data source connector, or a new application experience — all installable in minutes without rebuilding Grafana itself.

The App Store Analogy

Grafana plugins work like smartphone apps. Your phone ships with a browser, camera, and maps. You add a weather app, a banking app, and a fitness tracker from the app store when you need them. Grafana ships with built-in panel types and data sources. You install plugins for extra visualisations, databases, or cloud services whenever you need them.

Three Categories of Plugins

Panel Plugins

Panel plugins add new visualisation types beyond what Grafana includes by default. Install a panel plugin and a new option appears in the visualisation picker when editing a panel.

Popular panel plugins:

• Flowchart – draws process flows and diagrams with live metric labels on each node
• Discrete – shows state changes over time as coloured horizontal bars (perfect for on/off or status tracking)
• Treemap – shows hierarchical data as nested rectangles sized by value
• Worldmap Panel – plots metric values on a geographic map with colour-coded countries or coordinates
• Clock – shows a live clock or countdown timer on a dashboard (useful for control room displays)

Data Source Plugins

Data source plugins add connectors to databases and services that Grafana does not support natively.

Popular data source plugins:

• Infinity – queries any HTTP API, CSV, JSON, XML, or GraphQL endpoint and turns the result into Grafana data
• MongoDB – connects to MongoDB collections
• Snowflake – queries the Snowflake cloud data warehouse
• Splunk – reads from Splunk search results
• Zabbix – pulls metrics from Zabbix monitoring systems
• ServiceNow – surfaces incident and ticket data from ServiceNow

App Plugins

App plugins bundle together a set of dashboards, data source configurations, and custom pages into a cohesive product experience inside Grafana.

Popular app plugins:

• Grafana OnCall – on-call scheduling and escalation management built into Grafana
• Grafana k6 – performance test results and analysis from k6 load testing tool
• Grafana Kubernetes App – pre-built dashboards for monitoring Kubernetes clusters
• Grafana IRM (Incident Response & Management) – incident creation and tracking integrated with alerts

Installing Plugins

Method 1 – From the Grafana UI (Online)

Go to Administration → Plugins and data → Plugins. Search for the plugin by name. Click the plugin card and then click Install. Grafana downloads and installs the plugin from the Grafana plugin catalogue. Restart the Grafana server for some plugins to activate.

Method 2 – grafana-cli (Command Line)

Use the Grafana CLI tool to install plugins from the terminal. This method works on servers without internet access to the Grafana UI plugin page, and it is scriptable for automated setup.

# Install a plugin by ID
grafana-cli plugins install grafana-worldmap-panel

# Install a specific version
grafana-cli plugins install grafana-clock-panel 2.0.0

# List installed plugins
grafana-cli plugins ls

# Remove a plugin
grafana-cli plugins remove grafana-worldmap-panel

After installing via CLI, restart the Grafana service:

sudo systemctl restart grafana-server

Method 3 – Manual Installation (Offline)

Download the plugin ZIP file from grafana.com/grafana/plugins on a machine with internet access. Copy it to the Grafana plugins directory on the server.

Default plugins directory:  /var/lib/grafana/plugins/

Steps:
1. Download: grafana-worldmap-panel.zip
2. Copy to server: /var/lib/grafana/plugins/
3. Unzip: unzip grafana-worldmap-panel.zip
4. Restart: sudo systemctl restart grafana-server

Configuring the Plugins Directory

The plugins directory path is configurable in /etc/grafana/grafana.ini:

[paths]
plugins = /var/lib/grafana/plugins

Allowing Unsigned Plugins

Grafana verifies plugin signatures by default. Plugins from the official catalogue are signed by Grafana Labs. Community plugins that are unsigned require explicit permission to run.

In /etc/grafana/grafana.ini:

[plugins]
allow_loading_unsigned_plugins = my-custom-plugin,another-plugin

Only allow unsigned plugins from sources you trust. An unsigned plugin has not been verified by Grafana Labs and could theoretically contain malicious code.

Building a Custom Panel Plugin

If no existing plugin meets your needs, you can build your own. The Grafana Plugin Development Kit (grafana-plugin-sdk-go for backend plugins, and the @grafana/create-plugin tool for frontend panels) provides templates and APIs.

Create a new plugin project:
npx @grafana/create-plugin@latest

Choose plugin type:
  panel   ← for new visualisation types
  datasource ← for new data connectors
  app     ← for bundled experiences

Custom plugins run in the same environment as official plugins. During development, run Grafana with the development mode flag to hot-reload plugin changes without restarting the server.

Plugin Catalogue on grafana.com

The Grafana plugin catalogue at grafana.com/grafana/plugins lists over 150 official and community plugins. Each listing includes installation instructions, screenshots, a changelog, and a usage guide. Filtering by category (panels, data sources, apps) or by data source type (SQL, time-series, cloud) narrows the list quickly.