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Version: v1

Grafana Plugin

Without this plugin, Grafana dashboards are a separate tab the developer has to remember to open — and without the service entity as context, they're dashboards, not "the dashboard for this service." Enable the plugin, add grafana/dashboard-selector to the entity with a tag expression matching that service's dashboards, and an observability card appears in the entity overview. Metrics are now anchored to the service, not floating in a separate tool.

The Grafana plugin embeds Grafana dashboards and alert panels in entity pages, giving developers direct observability access from the catalog.

Grafana is not currently published as an OCI artifact by VeeCode

The @roadiehq/backstage-plugin-grafana package exists upstream (Roadie community plugins) but is not in any active workspace in devportal-plugin-export-overlays — the entry is commented out in the roadie-backstage-plugins workspace, which means VeeCode is not currently publishing an OCI image for it.

Your options:

  1. Reference the npm package directly — if upstream Roadie publishes a dynamic build of this plugin, you can use package: '@roadiehq/backstage-plugin-grafana' in dynamic-plugins.yaml. Confirm upstream has a -dynamic artifact before relying on this.
  2. Fork devportal-plugin-export-overlays and add the plugin to a workspace yourself, then publish your own OCI artifact.
  3. Use an alternative — for ready-to-use observability/quality plugins that VeeCode publishes today, see Tech Insights, SonarQube, or the kiali workspace for service-mesh observability.

The configuration below shows the composition contract (annotation + backend config) regardless of which installation path you choose.

Adding the plugin​

Via Marketplace​

If the Marketplace shows a Grafana plugin entry (the catalog is updated continuously), click Enable and skip the manual steps below.

Via dynamic-plugins.yaml​

If the OCI artifact is not available, you can still reference the upstream npm package or your own build. The illustrative OCI entry below uses placeholder workspace/tag — see the caution box above for the current publishing status.

plugins:
  - package: oci://quay.io/veecode/<workspace>:<tag>!roadiehq-backstage-plugin-grafana
    disabled: false
    pluginConfig:
      dynamicPlugins:
        frontend:
          roadiehq.backstage-plugin-grafana:
            mountPoints:
              - mountPoint: entity.page.overview/cards
                importName: EntityGrafanaDashboardsCard
                config:
                  layout:
                    gridColumn: "1 / -1"
                  if:
                    allOf:
                      - isGrafanaAvailable

Replace <workspace> and <tag> with the values that match your instance. See Adding Plugins for details on the OCI artifact format.

App configuration​

grafana:
  # The base URL of your Grafana instance
  domain: ${GRAFANA_URL}
  # Optional: Grafana API key for fetching dashboards programmatically
  # unifiedAlerting: true   # set to true if using Grafana Unified Alerting

Required annotation​

Add the following annotation to the component's catalog-info.yaml:

metadata:
  annotations:
    grafana/dashboard-selector: "tags @> 'my-service'"
    grafana/alert-label-selector: "service=my-service"
  • grafana/dashboard-selector — a Grafana tag expression that filters dashboards to show
  • grafana/alert-label-selector — a label selector for Grafana alerts

References​