Effects

Lighting and post-processing over the whole map: sun position, ambient occlusion, bloom, and distance and surface fog. The button is in the map control at the top right.

The button is the plugin's, the feature is kepler's

kepler ships the entire effects feature — the button component, the manager panel, the reducer state, the deck.gl lighting and post-processing passes. What it does not do is put the button in the toolbar: its stock map control never mounts it, and nothing in the core mounts the manager panel. Both are wired by the host application, which is what kepler's own demo app does.

This plugin is that host, so it replaces kepler's map control with one that adds the effects button and hosts the manager beside the toolbar. That is the single component the plugin swaps out; the rest of kepler's UI is untouched. See Differences from stock kepler.gl.

Two things from the demo app are deliberately not included: the SQL data explorer and the AI assistant. Neither belongs in a dashboard panel.

Thumbnails are vendored

The effect picker shows a preview image per effect. kepler names those under whatever asset base the host configures, and this plugin points that at its own assets — so the images ship with the plugin and are served from Grafana.

Nothing is fetched from a CDN, which is the same rule the rest of the plugin follows: no outbound call to any vendor, and no connect-src entry needed on a hardened Grafana.

What is worth using in a dashboard

Effects are a rendering cost on every frame, on a page that may hold several maps. Some earn it:

• Sun / lighting makes extruded polygons and 3D anything legible — without a light source, extrusion reads as flat colour.
• Ambient occlusion separates overlapping 3D geometry.
• Fog gives a tilted map depth, and quietly hides the horizon artefacts a tilted base map produces.

Bloom and the more decorative passes are hard to justify on a dashboard that is refreshing every thirty seconds and sharing a GPU with seven other panels.

Effects are saved with the map

Save current map captures them along with the layers and filters, so a provisioned dashboard can open with its lighting already set. See Map configuration.

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Upstream: kepler documents effects in its repository rather than on the docs site — Effects guide.

Written against kepler.gl 3.3.0-alpha.11. See Upstream documentation.