Crate grafana_plugin_sdk 

A lean, protocol-first SDK for building Grafana backend plugins in Rust.

Backend plugins communicate with Grafana via gRPC (the pluginv2 protocol), run as a go-plugin subprocess. This crate implements that protocol.

The default build is intentionally small and dependency-light — it implements only what a resource/health plugin needs: custom HTTP-style requests (CallResource) and health checks (CheckHealth). Dataframe queries and streaming are opt-in behind cargo features (see below).

The crate is organised into:

• backend contains the traits a plugin implements (e.g. ResourceService and DiagnosticsService) and the Plugin type that serves them.
• live contains channel/path types used by Grafana Live.
• data (feature data) contains the fundamental dataframe structures (Frame, Field) and their metadata.

The prelude re-exports the [GrafanaPlugin] derive macro and, with the data feature, the traits for building frames and fields.

The low-level generated structs are exposed in the pluginv2 module as an escape hatch, if required.

See the docs on backend plugins on grafana.com for an introduction to backend Grafana plugins.

Logging

Emit logs with the tracing macros; install backend::layer, call backend::init_hclog_subscriber before bootstrap work, or enable Plugin::init_subscriber so they are written in the hclog format Grafana understands. This is the idiomatic replacement for the Go SDK’s backend/log logger.

Build information

build_info! captures the plugin’s BuildInfo (id and version) from its Cargo metadata.

Feature flags

• automtls — go-plugin automatic mTLS, required to connect to a Grafana instance that serves backend plugins with AutoMTLS (the default). Opt-in.
• data — dataframe support: the data module (Frame/Field), DataService/QueryData, and Arrow IPC serialization. Pulls in Apache Arrow.
• stream — Grafana Live StreamService (implies data).
• httpadapter — a ResourceService that serves CallResource requests by running them through an axum::Router.
• reqwest — adds the httpclient module and an IntoHttpResponse implementation for reqwest::Response.
• prometheus — encodes a prometheus::Registry directly into CollectMetricsResponse.
• opentelemetry — extracts distributed trace context from Grafana’s incoming gRPC metadata and attaches it to each request’s tracing span.
• gen-proto — regenerate the protobuf bindings using a vendored protoc binary.

Re-exports

pub use arrow;

Modules

backend

Functionality for use by backend plugins.

buildinfo

Plugin build information.

data

Data types used throughout the SDK.

httpadapter

Serve Grafana CallResource requests using an axum::Router.

httpclient

A configurable HTTP client for calling Grafana or other services.

live

Grafana Live features, providing streaming functionality to Grafana.

pluginv2

The low-level structs generated from protocol definitions.

prelude

Contains useful helper traits, in particular the [GrafanaPlugin] derive macro and (with the data feature) the traits for constructing Fields and Frames.

Macros

build_info

Capture BuildInfo from the calling crate’s Cargo package metadata.

Attribute Macros

main

Generates a main function that starts a Plugin with the returned service struct.