Plugin protocol

We advise for backend plugins to not be implemented directly against this protocol. Instead, prefer to use the Grafana Plugin SDK for Go that implements this protocol and provides higher level APIs.

Additions of services, messages and fields in the latest version of the plugin protocol are expected to happen, but should not introduce any breaking changes. If breaking changes to the plugin protocol is needed, a new major version of the plugin protocol will be created and released together with a new major Grafana release. Grafana will then support both the old and the new plugin protocol for some time to make sure existing backend plugins continue to work.

Writing plugins without Go

If you want to write a backend plugin in another language than Go, then it’s possible as long as the language supports . However, writing a plugin in Go is recommended and has several advantages that should be carefully taken into account before proceeding:

• There’s an official SDK available.
• Building and compiling for multiple platforms is easy.
• Small footprint in regards to binary size and resource usage.