Map settings

kepler's map controls sit at the top right of the map: 3D, split view, legend, layer visibility, and — added by this plugin — effects. They work as documented upstream; what changes in a dashboard is the space you have to spend on them.

A panel is not a full window

kepler was designed for a browser tab. A dashboard tile is often 400 pixels tall, and several of these controls assume more room than that.

The panel's answer is Show side panel, which hides kepler's layer and filter panel entirely. Worth turning off on a small tile: the map becomes a map, and you configure it by temporarily enlarging the panel or editing it. The saved configuration keeps the styling either way.

3D

Tilts the camera. Needed for extruded polygons, for stacked velocity-field levels, and for the two relief base maps — see Base maps and relief.

Two things to expect on a tilted map:

• Your data does not drape over the relief. deck.gl draws at its own altitude. This is a deck.gl property, covered in Under the hood.
• Panning a tilted terrain map can make the camera jitter, because kepler pins MapLibre 4 (keplergl/kepler.gl#3394).

Globe

kepler's globe projection works, and looks striking on a large panel. Two practical caveats in a dashboard: it wants a lot of pixels to be legible at all, and the viewport-publishing channel describes a rectangle in degrees, which is a poor description of what a globe is showing.

Legend

Shows the colour and size encodings for the visible layers. It is part of the saved configuration, so a provisioned dashboard can open with it already on.

On a small tile it covers a meaningful share of the map. A stat panel or a text panel beside the map is often a better legend than the legend.

Split maps

Two synchronised views of the same data with different layers visible in each. Genuinely useful for before/after comparisons, and expensive: a split map is two sets of WebGL contexts, which brings the budget below into play sooner.

The WebGL context budget

Maps go black when there are too many

Each map holds two WebGL contexts — MapLibre's and deck.gl's — and browsers cap the total at around sixteen. Past that the browser evicts the oldest and those maps go black, with Too many active WebGL contexts in the console.

So roughly eight maps per page, fewer with split views.

The mitigation is Grafana's own: put maps in collapsed rows. Grafana does not render panels inside a collapsed row, and collapsing one releases its contexts. The plugin's layer gallery dashboard is built this way for exactly this reason — thirteen maps, five collapsible rows, two open at a time.

If a dashboard genuinely needs many maps visible at once, the answer is usually fewer, larger maps with more layers each.

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Upstream: Map settings · Map styles

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