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Radar visual editor, expandable editor, and context migration updates in Business Charts 6.3.0

Daria Volkova
Creative Director at Volkov Labs, Grafana Champion

We are happy to announce the release of the Business Charts panel 6.3.0. This release includes the following updates:

  • Included Bar, Sunburst, and Radar into the Visual editor and updated examples on https://echarts.volkovlabs.io accordingly.
  • Added Expandable editor for the Charts function.
  • Updated context migration from older versions.
Grafana Catalog

The plugin was updated in the Grafana Plugins catalog on August 27, 2024.

Downloads

The Business Charts panel seems unstoppable with the number of its downloads worldwide. It went from 2M to more than 3M in 5 months. Wow!

The Business Charts panel has been downloaded more than 3 000 000 times.
The Business Charts panel has been downloaded more than 3 000 000 times.

Included Bar, Sunburst, and Radar into the Visual editor

We are actively working on expanding the Visual Editor functionality.

Visual Charts Editor tutorial for Business Charts 6.4.0.

In this release, we added more parameters for the Bar, Sunburst, and Radar types. The best way to learn what is available now is to review the updated examples at https://echarts.volkovlabs.io

Open a chart in the Edit mode and review the type-specific available parameters. More to come in the near future.

Review the available type-specific parameters on our demo server.
Review the available type-specific parameters on our demo server.

Expandable editors the Charts function

For a better user experience, we added the expand the editor area button.

Expand the code area button.
Expand the code area button.

You can find this button at the top left corner of the Code parameter.

Use the expand the code area button to open your code in a separate window.
Use the expand the code area button to open your code in a separate window.

Updated context migration from older versions

In the previous release of the Business Charts, we published a mandatory migration guide for the context parameters.

Since then, several users have contacted us, mentioning their struggle with the migration process. In this release, we updated automatic migration (where possible) to mitigate the migration effort.

Based of the feedback, that change lifted the migration burden significantly. However, please be aware that you might still have problems with some marginal cases.

Getting Started

You can install the Business Charts panel from the Grafana Plugins catalog or using the Grafana command line tool.

Install Business Suite plugins in Cloud, OSS, Enterprise. Getting started with the Business Suite.

For the latter, please use the following command.

grafana cli plugins install volkovlabs-echarts-panel

Tutorial

This is the first video we created about Business Charts after the plugin rebranding. It features dazzling chart examples followed by a high-level plugin architecture. Knowing the basics of plugin architecture will help you create your custom charts.

To get you started quicker we prepared the web resource with numerous ready-to-use examples. In the video, Daria demonstrates how to work with this resource.

The main obstacle for many plugin users is the data transmission from the Grafana data frame(s) into the Charts function. In the video, in addition to the resource with how-to examples, Daria introduces the Visual Editor - the mechanism we started to work on to simplify the transmission.

Business Charts panel for Grafana 6.0.0 powered by Apache ECharts library.

We have many other tutorials that you can find helpful. You can review all related to this plugin tutorials here.

Release Notes

Features / Enhancements in 6.3.0

  • Added visual editor for bar and sunburst (#322)
  • Added Expandable Editors (#324)
  • Updated Examples dashboards (#325)

Features / Enhancements in 6.2.0

  • Updated to Apache ECharts 5.5.1 (#309)
  • Updated E2E workflow using Docker (#310)
  • Updated migration for context parameters (#317)
  • Added Radar to visual editor (#316)

Features / Enhancements in 6.1.0

  • Added plugin e2e tests and remove cypress (#281, #283)
  • Updated context parameters in Examples (#282)
  • Added Business Charts video tutorial (#291)
  • Updated provisioning for events (#289)
  • Updated panel options (#289)
  • Updated Code suggestions (#293)
  • Updated to Grafana 11.0 and dependencies (#294)

Always happy to hear from you

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