April 2016 Summaries

Daniel Lee's blog post delves into enhancing a simple Clock Panel Plugin for Grafana, making it more customizable and user-friendly. The article explains how to implement features such as selecting between a 12 or 24-hour clock, adjusting font sizes, changing background colors, and setting date/time formats. Additionally, Lee introduces functionalities like time zone support and countdown timers, all while demonstrating how these customizations can be integrated into Grafana's editor mode using Angular templates and Grafana's conventions. The post also addresses technical aspects such as using Lodash for setting default values, managing potential memory leaks with Angular's $timeout, and handling event-driven updates in Grafana. The plugin's code, which is accessible on GitHub, highlights a practical approach for new plugin authors to create flexible and interactive panels in Grafana, with the potential for further enhancements through community contributions.

Daniel Lee's blog post details the development process for creating a Clock Panel plugin for Grafana 3.0, leveraging the new plugin system architecture that allows for the sharing of plugins via Grafana.net. He explains the different types of plugins available in Grafana—Datasources, Apps, Panels, and Dashboards—and focuses specifically on panel plugins, which are used to display data on dashboards. Lee's Clock Panel plugin uses JavaScript to fetch the current time without the need for a datasource and offers a step-by-step guide on setting up a plugin development environment using tools like Angular, ES6, Babel, and Grunt. He describes the creation of essential files such as plugin.json and module.js, and the styling of the plugin using CSS. The post concludes with instructions on publishing the plugin to Grafana.net and hints at future enhancements to make the clock customizable with features like date formatting and countdown capabilities.

Grafana 3.0 Beta introduces a significant update with over 1500 commits from more than 30 contributors, featuring enhanced extensibility through a revamped plugin SDK/API, allowing new panel and app plugins to enrich the user experience. This release includes commercial support options, improved personalization, and playlist functionalities, as well as a sleek new UI with numerous usability enhancements. Grafana.net is launched as a hub for discovering and managing plugins and dashboards, alongside a new command-line tool, grafana-cli, for easy plugin installation. Notable improvements have been made to data sources like Prometheus, InfluxDB, and OpenTSDB, while the styling system has been modernized with SASS, ES6, and Typescript to improve code maintainability. Although the eagerly anticipated alerting feature is postponed to focus on technical debt reduction, existing dashboards remain largely compatible, with some potential adjustments needed for those using templating.