Grafana Developer Newsletter - July 2025

Grafana Plugin Development Announcements
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Welcome to the first edition of Grafana for Developers, a newsletter created following community feedback, asking for a convenient way to stay informed about significant updates and changes relevant to Grafana contributors and plugin developers.

Please share your thoughts through the feedback link at the bottom to help us ensure we are giving you the information you need.

Breaking changes

  1. Grafana 12.0.0: removal of AngularJS. It was disabled by default in Grafana 11 (released in May 2024) and communications about this change have been ongoing since Grafana 9. (Docs)
  2. Grafana 12.0.0: UI Extensions - we removed all deprecated APIs - getPluginExtensions, usePluginExtensions, usePluginLinkExtensions, usePluginComponentExtensions in the Grafana 12 release in May 2025.
  3. Grafana 12.0.2: - plugins declaring a dependency on another plugin can no longer reference a specific version. If the plugin dependency is not yet installed, latest will be chosen. (PR)
  4. React Router 6 migration - Apps still using React Router 5 should upgrade as soon as possible using this guide, as we will be removing react router 5 support in upcoming versions.
  5. Scenes v6 migration - @grafana/scenes version 6 also moves to use react-router 6, which needs additional migration steps for plugins that are upgrading the package, please follow the steps in the release description.

New platform capabilities

  1. Add persistent user-specific storage to your plugins, like browser localStorage but persisted and working across multiple sessions,. . (Docs)
  2. Plugin Usage Stats :chart_increasing:are now available in your “My Plugins” area on grafana.com - you can see the Download counts, Installation counts by Grafana version as well as Query Counts if you maintain a data source plugin.
  3. We are standardizing links on plugin catalog details pages, to make it easier for users to engage with developers and find essential information they need to get the most out of a plugin. (Announcement)
  4. UI Extensions - If you’re creating extension points and want to share typescript types between plugins you should check out @grafana/plugin-types and its shared workflow.

Plugin Tooling

  1. Our recommended e2e workflows got an update - you can now publish your e2e testing reports to github pages which makes it easier to preview them. Additionally you will get information about which tests passed or failed directly as a comment to your PRs! (PR, Docs)
  2. In order to make updating the scaffolded plugin code easier we want to ensure that custom adjustments made by developers are separated from the main docker compose file we provide (PR)
  3. Create Plugin now includes limited support for yarn berry (>=2.0.0). See the PR for full details. Moving away from (deprecated) yarn 1 is recommended.
  4. Easily catch when your plugin may be incompatible with Grafana versions you intend to support with our new eslint package. It is a simple eslint plugin that checks whether imports from any of the Grafana packages (PR) exist in all the Grafana versions specified in the grafanaDependency in plugin.json.

New Docs and Tutorials

  1. We are constantly striving to help you maintain backwards compatibility for your plugins. We have a new article that explains how to manage backward compatibility with runtime checks that will allow you to take advantage of the latest features, whilst keeping users on older versions of Grafana happy.
  2. The tutorial on how to implement RBAC in app plugins got extended to action sets, folder access level with permissions which provides a way for plugins to extend Grafana’s View, Edit or Admin access to a folder.
  3. New tutorial on how to add support for Private Data Source Connect (PDC) to your plugins, allowing Grafana Cloud users to access services within private networks.
  4. Now you can integrate with the LLM plugin in your plugins to let your plugins not only use an LLM but also use Grafana directly through the power of MCP

Key resources

Looking for help with development? Check out these resources:

Feedback

This is our first edition of the newsletter and we want to ensure the content is interesting and relevant. Please let us know if you have any suggestions or comments.

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