Canvas Panel as an alternative for the flowchart plugin

Grafana
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The flowcharting plugin is no longer maintained and is based on Angular. This plugin is still actively being used in the community, but as of Grafana 11, Angular support is disabled by default.

This means that community members who are currently relying on the flowcharting plugin should have a viable alternative to turn to. See this open GitHub issue regarding this in the flowcharting plugin’s repo.

Grafana Labs officially supports the canvas panel as a core visualization. In Grafana 11, canvas received a number of enhancements pushing its capabilities.

We would like to use this topic as a place to gather feedback from our community members who currently rely on the flowcharting plugin and what their experience is using the canvas panel as an alternative. What is working well? What isn’t working? What critical functionality, if any, is missing? etc.

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Hey @nathanmarrs, first thanks a lot to you and the canvas team to be giving attention to this flowcharting issue.

IMHO, the main feature that flowcharting brings to the table is about importing the XML diagrams from draw.io. In Brazil we even got a friend that did a full course on Flowcharting (Datasource Zabbix) using this approach.

I don’t know how much the language will be a blocker here, but here’s the course playlist for reference:

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In fact, here in Brazil we use the flowcharting plugin a lot, it is more practical for us because we can draw outside of grafana, using a program that makes everything more practical, which is draw.io, as mentioned by the friend in the other comment, and some canvas features are good, but it still doesn’t compare to what clowcharting can deliver, the first point is the ease of creating views, as I mentioned above, using draw.io and then just importing the XML, the other is that As we have a greater possibility of drawings using drawio when adding functions to lines, circles, among others, when we add functions to objects, everything becomes more simplified, but the point is not just simplicity, but the possibility of things The advantage of just being able to import the XML of something created in drawio is great.

For example, when we monitor switches, routers… we can draw the ports, draw the cables easily. As for Canvas, things end up getting more complicated, the plugin has huge chances of growth, as part of the community I’m happy to see your concern, and I really hope to be able to contribute to the construction of this new and reformulated canvas plugin.

I really hope that my report contributes to something positive.

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if canvas cannot implement import of xml feature, it would be hard for people to use canvas and one has to recreate the panel from scratch.

this could be another viable approach

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A big one for my use case is the ability to apply conditions to the animated lines feature, which would make them properly useful for representing bidirectional systems (water tanks, storage, energy production, etc). This has been raised as a feature request already here: Feature Request/Canvas : Connector Dynamic Flow Direction based on a metric sign · Issue #92369 · grafana/grafana · GitHub
This simple enhancement would make meaningful flow diagrams attainable in the Canvas panel.