Grafana 9 was released at GrafanaCONline 2022 on June 14, and it's the best version so far. Our open-source and commercial plugins were successfully tested using the 9.0.0-beta3 released weeks ago and updated using the latest Grafana 9 toolkit on the day it was released.
One of the topics I heard from the Grafana community it's the hesitation to use third-party plugins:
- Community plugins are not updated constantly and stopped being maintained after a while.
- It is better not to use them and stick to the plugins supported by the Grafana team.
Volkov Labs regularly updates our open-source, commercial plugins and templates based on the latest version of Grafana to stay up-to-date. With every significant Grafana release, we increase the major number in the plugin's version.
Below I want to highlight the latest updates with tutorials on how to hit the ground running.
Base64 Image/Video/Audio/PDF panel
The Base64 Image/Video/Audio/PDF Panel is a plugin for Grafana that displays Base64 encoded files in PNG, JPG, GIF, MP4, WEBM, MP3, OGG, and PDF formats.
The popular plugin was recently updated to support Video and Audio files in modern formats. You can learn more about this plugin through the newly revamped video on our YouTube channel.
The Base64 panel version 3.0.0 is updated in the Grafana Catalog and supports Grafana 8.5+.
RSS/Atom Data Source
Created to display a Blog news feed on our demo server, the RSS/Atom data source became popular when Grafana removed proxy support in the News panel.
The data source supports different RSS and Atom formats with logic to extract various fields making it the most straightforward plugin to visualize news and updates.
The RSS/Atom Data Source 2.0.0 is updated in the Grafana Catalog and supports Grafana 8.5+. For older versions of Grafana, please use version 1.7.0.
Environment Data Source
The Environment data source is a plugin for Grafana that returns environment variables to visualize or use as Dashboard Variables. It's a unique plugin we created for The Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the balenaCloud.
Because of security reasons, the Environment Data Source can not be included in the Grafana Catalog.
It can be installed from our private repository or downloaded directly from GitHub.
grafana-cli --repo https://volkovlabs.io/plugins plugins install volkovlabs-env-datasource
The Environment Data Source 2.0.0 supports Grafana 8.5+. For older versions of Grafana, please use version 1.2.0.
Data Manipulation Panel
The Data Manipulation Panel is a plugin for Grafana that can be used to insert, update application data, and modify configuration directly from your Grafana dashboard.
We understand the risk of data manipulation and take security concerns seriously. We recently published an article exploring three secure ways to connect the Data Manipulation panel to the API Server.
The Data Manipulation panel is available in the Grafana Catalog.
Please let us know if you have any questions or feature requests for this plugin in the GitHub Issues.
Business Charts Panel
The Business Charts panel is a plugin for Grafana that allows visualizing Apache ECharts on your Grafana dashboard.
The original plugin was developed for Grafana 6.3/7.0 and ECharts 4.9.0. It has not been maintained since then. Volkov Labs adapted and updated it based on the Grafana 9 with ECharts 5.3.3, introducing new features like Monaco Code Editor and supporting SVG and Canvas renderer.
The Business Charts panel is available in the Grafana Catalog.
