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.

5

The solution is implemented in the grafana helm chart via option shadowBundledPlugins
by mounting additional emptyDir.
This worked for me with Grafana 13.0.3.

When will this be included in the grafana operator CRDs?