Extend your Amazon Managed Grafana experience with Grafana community plugins

Today, Amazon Managed Grafana announces a new self-service plugin management experience for Grafana community plugins, that enables you to unify data from a wider variety of data sources with visualizations tailored to analyze your unique datasets. Grafana community plugins provide an expansive array of tailor-made solutions to address diverse visualization use cases. With this release, Amazon Managed Grafana 9.4 and above versions will support discovery and installation of plugins from over three hundred pre-built Grafana plugins, directly from your workspace.

Plugins

Grafana plugins enhance user experience with a wide range of functionalities such as querying data from a new data source for better insights and improved visualizations of that data. Broadly, there are three types of plugins and Amazon Managed Grafana supports all of them.

• Panel plugin: add new visualizations to your dashboard
• Datasource plugin: connect to a new database or other external source of data
• App plugin: an integrated out-of-the-box experience, often bundling data sources and panels

Enable plugin management

Plugin management can be enabled from Amazon Managed Grafana console by simply checking the Turn plugin management on checkbox in the Workspace configuration options tab. Turning plugin management on allows admins in your Amazon Managed Grafana workspace, to discover, install, update, and uninstall plugins, directly from the workspace.

The following screenshot shows how to enable plugin management while you create a new workspace.

Figure 1: New Grafana Workspace

The following screenshot shows how to enable plugin management for an existing workspace.

Figure 2: Existing Grafana Workspace

You can also enable plugin management using the Amazon Managed Grafana API or the AWS CLI.

Using Amazon Managed Grafana API

PUT /workspaces/<workspace-id>/configuration HTTP/1.1
Content-type: application/json
{"configuration": "{\"plugins\": { \"pluginAdminEnabled\": true }}"}

Using AWS CLI

aws grafana update-workspace-configuration \
    --region region \
    --workspace-id <workspace-id> \
    --configuration '{"plugins": {"pluginAdminEnabled": true}}'

Installing and uninstalling a plugin

Newly created Amazon Managed Grafana workspaces v9.4 or above will now ship with only one plugin – `AWS Data sources App plugin` that enables discovery of AWS service data sources, in addition to the core plugins. to You can browse all available plugins by navigating to Amazon Managed Grafana console Administration -> Plugins and then select the desired plugin and its version to install. If a newly installed version does not meet your requirements or breaks any existing visualizations, you have the option to install an older version. You can also use the Plugin API to manage plugins in the Amazon Managed Grafana workspace.

Security

Security and Compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. Amazon Managed Grafana is a SOC compliant service and new plugins will be available only once they pass the malware scanning. Additionally, whenever a new vulnerability is discovered with any plugin already installed in a Grafana workspace, Amazon Managed Grafana will block the respective version for new installs and upgrades. Sometimes, a new version of a plugin is made available that fixes a security issue in an installed plugin. For severe issues, Amazon Managed Grafana might automatically update the plugin in your workspace to the version with the fix.

Conclusion

This new feature empowers you to own your Amazon Managed Grafana experience and curate it to your needs. The ability to add plugins that suit your business use case without the operational overhead of a self-managed environment eliminates the undifferentiated heavy lifting from your end. To explore more about this new plugin feature, refer to the user documentation here. To learn more about Amazon Managed Grafana features and its pricing, visit the product page and pricing page.

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• Refer AWS Observability best practices to learn more about prescriptive guidance and recommendations with implementation examples.
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• Check out AWS Observability accelerator for CDK which is a set of opinionated modules to help you set up observability for your AWS environments.

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