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Think Big

We love how flexible the Grafana architecture is. If something was not originally thought of, you, the contributor, can elegantly fill the gap.

Grafana does not hold you back. Instead, it equips you with everything to work wonders. It is the real beauty of Grafana!

You do not want to miss this insight​

Initially, visualization panels have been designed to be a one-way data flow mechanism with the primary function of displaying time series, bars, pies, etc.

In ancient times, users had a limited number of available visualizations. Their steps were:

  • Select a visualization from a drop-down list available in the edit mode of any panel.
  • Guess the data format required by the selected panel.
  • Connect to a data source ensuring that it fetches the data in the required format.

Two community plugins expanded that paradigm beyond imaginable:

  • With the Business Charts plugin, instead of a limited number of visualizations, you have infinite ones.

  • With the Data Manipulation plugin, instead of just visualization, you can manage your data and even system behavior. If with the original design, a user was seen as a silent, opinionless reader then now with a Data Manipulation panel, a user is promoted to Mission Control Center commander.

To Summarize my inspirational pitch​

I reference these two plugins for the simple reason of showing you the potential you are up against. I want you to be able to color outside the lines and sculpt Grafana into the necessary form as opposed to trying to fit your requirements into the preset mold.