Theme

Follow dashboard theme is on by default and makes the panel look like the dashboard around it rather than like a slab of kepler's own grey.

What it changes

Two things: kepler's UI chrome, and the base map.

The UI

A subset of kepler's theme is overridden from the Grafana theme — the surfaces that would visibly clash with the dashboard:

kepler surface	Taken from Grafana
Side panel background	background.primary
Side panel header	background.canvas
Sub-panel backgrounds	background.secondary, action.hover
Inputs	components.input.background, action.hover, action.selected
Primary buttons	primary.main / primary.shade
Secondary buttons	secondary.main / secondary.shade
Text, headings, subtext	text.primary, text.maxContrast, text.secondary
Borders	border.weak
Active/selected accents	primary.main

kepler's theme object is much larger than that. Spacing, typography scale and component internals are left alone deliberately — the goal is a panel that belongs in the dashboard, not a reimplementation of kepler's design system in Grafana's tokens.

The base map

When Base map is set to Match theme — the default — the theme also decides which Carto style is used: Dark Matter in dark mode, Positron in light.

Pick any other base map explicitly and that choice stands in both themes. A satellite map does not become a light satellite map.

Turning it off

Switch Follow dashboard theme off and kepler keeps its own dark styling regardless of what Grafana is doing.

Two reasons you might:

• A dashboard shown on a wall or a projector, where kepler's own high-contrast dark UI reads better than a themed light one.
• Screenshots for documentation or a report that should look like kepler.gl rather than like your Grafana instance.

Note that the base map still follows the Base map option; turning the theme off does not force a dark base map, it only stops the Match theme choice from tracking Grafana.

Light mode and imagery

Satellite imagery is neither light nor dark, and kepler is told so explicitly — its colour mode for those styles is none, so it does not try to pick label colours as though the base map were one or the other. The topographic style is declared light, because it is.

This matters for the automatic contrast kepler applies to layer labels: get it wrong and white text lands on white ice.

Saved configurations override this too

As with the base map, a saved map configuration carries styling decisions and applies them on load. If a dashboard stubbornly ignores the theme, check whether it has a saved configuration before looking anywhere else — see Map configuration.