Local development guide

Welcome to the explore-metrics wiki!

Running the Metrics Drilldown app in a containerized Grafana instance

Prerequisites

• Node.js 22 or higher
• Docker Desktop

Steps

1. Clone this repo: grafana/metrics-drilldown
2. In your terminal, navigate to the location of the metrics-drilldown project
3. npm install to install the project’s dependencies
4. Ensure that Docker Desktop is running
5. npm run server spins up a Grafana instance with a Prometheus data source (in Docker)
6. npm run dev builds the app plugin and makes it reactive to code changes
7. In the sidebar, go to More apps > Metrics Drilldown

Running the Metrics Drilldown app in grafana/grafana

grafana/metrics-drilldown

1. Clone grafana/metrics-drilldown and switch to your branch of interest.
2. Install frontend dependencies (npm install)
3. Build the frontend with the build script (npm run build)

grafana/grafana

1. Create a symlink for grafana-metricsdrilldown-app in the Grafana plugins directory. We do this by running the following command from the grafana/grafana root:

ln -s ../../../metrics-drilldown data/plugins/grafana-metricsdrilldown-app

2. Configure Grafana to allow unsigned plugins by enabling development mode for apps in conf/custom.ini:

app_mode = development

3. Also in conf/custom.ini, ensure that the exploreMetricsUseExternalAppPlugin feature toggle is enabled. This can be accomplished with either:

# conf/custom.ini

[feature_toggles]

enable=exploreMetricsUseExternalAppPlugin,someOtherToggleA,someOtherToggleB

or:

# conf/custom.ini

[feature_toggles]

exploreMetricsUseExternalAppPlugin = true

4. Start/restart grafana
5. In the Sidebar, go to More apps > Explore Metrics