Appearance
Layers and attributes
The panel on the left of the map is kepler.gl's own, unmodified. Layers, their styling, the blend modes, the ordering — all of it is documented upstream, and this page only covers what is different about using it inside a Grafana panel.
What the panel has already done for you
By the time you open the layer list, the panel has turned each query into a dataset and, where it could, built the layer:
| You get automatically | From |
|---|---|
| Point | a lat/lng pair |
| Polygon / GeoJSON | a geometry column |
| H3 hexagon | a column of valid H3 indices |
| Trip | a trip id + time + position |
| Flow | origin and destination columns |
See How a query becomes a map. Everything else — heatmap, grid, hexbin, cluster, icon, arc, line, S2 — you create by hand here, choosing the dataset and pointing the layer's columns at it.
Adding a layer by hand
+ Add Layer → pick a type → pick the dataset → assign its columns. The columns offered are the ones your query returned, under the names the panel gave them: coordinate roles arrive as latitude and longitude, geometry as _geojson, origin/destination as lat0/lng0/lat1/lng1. Every column without a role keeps its original name.
Attributes
Every layer has colour, "colour based on", a palette, a scale and opacity. Beyond that they diverge: point-like layers have radius and stroke, aggregation layers have cell size and coverage, polygons have extrusion and wireframe. kepler's own reference is the place for the full list.
Two are worth calling out here because they cause confusion in a dashboard:
Radius. kepler's default point radius is small, and on a country-sized view a few thousand points can read as an empty map. This is the first thing to change, not the last.
High-precision rendering when zooming in closely. kepler's documentation lists this on point, arc, line, icon, geojson, hexagon and grid layers. It is not there in the version this plugin ships. The setting survives as a constant and a type in kepler 3.3.0-alpha.11, but no layer declares or reads it — deck.gl retired the separate 64-bit path years ago and its current precision handling is always on. Do not go looking for the switch. See Under the hood.
Styling does not save itself
Everything you set here lives in kepler's store. It survives a query refresh — the panel swaps data underneath your layers rather than rebuilding them — but not a page reload, until you capture it with Map configuration → Save current map. See Map configuration.
Layers configured with a URL
Six of kepler's layer types are configured with a URL rather than with data: vector tile, raster tile, WMS, 3D tiles, bitmap, and 3D models.
Two of those a query can reach after all, because a URL is a string like any other: a raster_url column draws a raster tile layer, and a wms_url/wms_layer pair draws a WMS. See Rasters and WMS services.
The other four you add by hand — and on a hardened Grafana you will need the host in connect-src either way. See Layers configured with a URL.
Upstream: Types of layers · Layer attributes · The kepler.gl workflow
Written against kepler.gl 3.3.0-alpha.11, which is what this plugin bundles. kepler's public documentation describes the 3.2 stable line and lists fifteen layer types; the pre-release registers nineteen, the Flow layer among them. See Upstream documentation.