This talk was presented at Open South Code 2026.
Grafana is powerful on its own. However, its true potential lies in its vibrant community of plugin developers. In this talk, we’ll explore how community plugins extend Grafana’s core functionality, enabling you to connect to a broader range of data sources and visualize your data in new ways, or start creating your own.
As a practical example, we’ll introduce the Kafka Data Source plugin and demonstrate how it lets you query and visualize Kafka topic data directly in your dashboards, eliminating the need for intermediate storage or external services. We’ll also demo how to build your first plugin.
Demo repository: https://github.com/thopewell/grafana-kafka-datasource-demo
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