hi, i’m new to using grafana but one thing which seems like it should be trivial appears to not exist at all; i’d like to embed multiline text from a local (filesystem) or remote (http) source, and additionally match against it with a variable - i don’t see how to do either of those things without going deep and writing my own plugin. am i missing something?
You can use this plugin to pull in external data: https://grafana.com/plugins/ryantxu-ajax-panel
I’m not sure what you mean by “match it against a variable”, but if it’s a template variable, you should be able to add that to the url param in the panel.
i do not want to do this in the frontend, i want it to pull data using the backend like any other panel. any arbitrary user with access to the panel should not have access to this network or filesystem resource which the server has access to (or need to deal with CORS for that matter)
We’ll need to create a new datasource plugin to support this.
like i said, i don’t have the experience nor energy to create and maintain a plugin like that. seemed like it should be a standard feature.
I’ll volunteer to build it 
that’d be fantastic, haha. i’d be glad to provide feedback as you work through it
how would this work, btw? could i have it dump text from any arbitrary url or filesystem object into a variable and then put that variable in a text panel?
that would the basic function, a “query” that specifies a remote url, then use a template variable to perform the query and substitute the result in the text panel (or any other panel that would take a template variable)
rad, that’s pretty much exactly what i wanted!
@bkgann hey, no rush, but any updates so far?