Making integrations easy with plugins

Without a doubt, plugins are a powerful tool in Grafana.

Grafana comes, by default, with a wide range of data sources and panels. As soon as you have Grafana running, you have all of them ready to use.

However, there are endless possibilities for using Grafana. Here is where plugins come to the rescue.

There are three types of plugins:

• Panel plugins
• Data source plugins
• App plugins

Besides the plugins developed by Grafana Labs, you can use a lot of community plugins made by independent developers.

Let’s see what each of them can be used for.

Data source plugins

You can use data source plugins to access new types of databases. These plugins establish communication with databases and present the information in a way that Grafana understands.

So, connecting a new database is as easy as installing a data source plugin and configuring it.

You will use data source plugins to add access to databases...