Developer tools in Grafana

Refer to the Grafana developer portal to access the following documentation:

Plugin development

You can develop your own Grafana plugin to enhance the features of Grafana, such as:

Panel plugins to visualize data
Data source plugins to connect to a new database or other source of data
App plugins to provide integrated out-of-the-box experiences

Refer to Grafana plugin tools for all the information.

Data structure in Grafana

Grafana supports a variety of different data sources, each with its own data model. To manage this, Grafana consolidates the query results from each of these data sources into one unified data structure called a data frame. Additionally, the data plane adds a property layer to the data frame with information about the data frame type and what the data frame holds.

Refer to the Grafana data structure documentation to learn more.

List of data sources that use the data plane

As of October 2025, the following data sources send data plane data in at least some of their responses:

Prometheus, including Amazon and Azure variants
Loki
Azure Monitor
Azure Data Explorer
BigQuery
ClickHouse
Cloudflare
Databricks
Influx
MySQL
New Relic
Oracle
Postgres
Snowflake
Victoria metrics

To see examples of data planes, refer to data plane example data in GitHub.