Grafana 13.0 — Elasticsearch plugin background installer fails with permission denied on plugins-bundled directory

Grafana
,
1

Hi,

After upgrading from Grafana 12 to 13, all Elasticsearch datasources show “Plugin not found, no installed plugin with that id.”

Per the docs, the Elasticsearch plugin should
be pre-installed automatically in v13.0. However, the background installer crashes on startup:

The background installer can’t update the bundled Elasticsearch plugin because
/usr/share/grafana/data/plugins-bundled/ is read-only in the container:

{“error”:“unlinkat /usr/share/grafana/data/plugins-bundled/elasticsearch/CHANGELOG.md: permission denied”, “logger”:“plugin.backgroundinstaller”,“msg”:“Failed to install plugin”,“pluginId”:“elasticsearch”}

Setup:

  • Architecture: linux/arm64
  • Helm chart version: 12.1.3
  • Grafana version: 13.0.1
  • Plugin visible in UI: yes (v12.5.5, released Apr 20, 2026)

Regards,
Tobbe

2

Just had the same problem.
In my case, I found that Grafana could not write into the /var/lib/grafana/plugins directory, as the ownership (after adding in other plugins before the upgrade) was not grafana:grafana.

Changed permissions of the folder accordingly, performed an install of the Elasticsearch plugin (via the UI), and restarted the grafana-server service (existing Elastic datasources were not found until this occurred).

3

temporary workaround
In grafana.ini
plugin_admin_enabled: false
This stops Grafana from trying to update bundled plugins.

4

I fixed the issue by simply mounting an empty directory to /usr/share/grafana/data/plugins-bundled/elasticsearch, which means that the started container no longer has a bundled elasticsearch plugin. Then I added elasticsearch to the plugins to be installed, and I have the newest version installed without Grafana every trying to uninstall an old version.