Developer resources on Grafana Labs

Contribute to Grafana

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:35:46 -0500

Contribute to Grafana

This page lists resources for developers who want to contribute to the Grafana software ecosystem or build plugins for Grafana.

Make technical contributions

Choose how you want to contribute to Grafana, from code to plugins to community support.

Contribute code to Grafana

Contributing to Grafana introduces the contribution process and community resources.
Developer guide shows how to set up your environment and run Grafana in development.
Architecture guides explain Grafana’s background architecture.
Create a pull request walks you through preparing a clear, descriptive pull request.
Browse all issues to find a good first task. You can also filter by help wanted.
Use the REST APIs to interact programmatically with the Grafana backend.

Develop a Plugin

Read the plugin development guide to choose a plugin type, scaffold your project, and develop locally.

Contribute without code

Report a bug with the bug report template and include steps to reproduce.
Submit a feature request to propose improvements.
Improve our docs with the documentation contribution guide.
Help with issue triage by reviewing, labeling, and clarifying open issues.
Report security vulnerabilities following our security policy.

Communicate with Grafana

Use the right place to ask questions, report problems, and propose changes.

GitHub issues and pull requests: Use for reproducible bugs in core Grafana and maintained plugins, small and actionable feature requests, and code or docs changes via pull requests. Avoid general “how do I” questions. For security issues, follow the security policy.
Grafana community forums: Use for questions, troubleshooting, best practices, plugin development Q&A, and early idea discussion. Forums create a searchable public knowledge base that helps others with the same problems and questions. Start here if you are unsure: Grafana community forums.
Grafana Community Slack: Use for quick, time-sensitive chats and networking. Do not rely on Slack for long troubleshooting or decisions. Share outcomes back to a forum topic or GitHub issue/PR to keep a public record: Grafana Community Slack.
Not sure where to start? Start with a forum topic. Maintainers and community members will redirect you if a GitHub issue or pull request is more appropriate.

Best practices and style

Our style guides outline Grafana style for frontend, backend, documentation, and more, including best practices. Please read through them before you start editing or coding!

Backend style guide explains how we want to write Go code in the future.
Documentation style guide applies to all documentation created for Grafana products.
End to end test framework provides guidance for Grafana e2e tests.
Frontend style guide provides rules and guidance on developing in React for Grafana.
Redux framework explains how Grafana handles Redux boilerplate code.
Styling Grafana expands on styling React components with Emotion.
Theming Grafana explains how to use themes and ThemeContext in Grafana code.

Developer tools

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:35:46 -0500

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.

Grafana APIs

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:35:46 -0500

Grafana APIs

Refer to the following API reference guides:

Contribute to Grafana

Refer to the Contribute to Grafana guide to learn the various ways you can contribute to Grafana, and read the Grafana Labs Software Grant and Contributor License Agreement before making any contribution.

Developer tools

Learn about the development tools available in Grafana, as well as the Grafana data structure.

Grafana APIs

Read the API reference guides available in Grafana.