What it is

A Grafana panel plugin that runs kepler.gl inside the panel, fed by any Grafana data source. It is built for spatio-temporal data — points, trajectories, origin–destination flows, velocity fields — and it configures itself from the columns your query already returns.

kepler.gl is the geospatial visualisation library Uber open-sourced and Foursquare now maintains. It renders with deck.gl on WebGL, which is what lets it draw hundreds of thousands of features and animate them.

See it running before you install anything

The dashboards built with this panel are live at grafana.ubica.ec — trajectories, wind fields, satellite imagery on a clock, polygons out of a database, tables that re-rank as you pan. Anonymous visitors are let in as read-only viewers, so you can pan, filter and play them with no account and nothing installed.

What runs where

The whole library runs in the panel, in your browser, against the rows your data source returned. There is no iframe and no hosted service rendering the map: the browser draws it directly. It does still reach outward for pixels — Carto, Esri and Mapterhorn for the default base maps, and https://titiler.xyz by default for raster tiles — see Install → Hardened Grafana for the exact hosts and how to point every one of them at infrastructure of your own instead. kepler's own icon library ships with the plugin, so that piece at least is never fetched from a CDN at runtime.

That matters for three kinds of install. An air-gapped Grafana can serve its own style.json and never reach the internet. A Grafana with content_security_policy = true needs a handful of connect-src hosts for the base map tiles and nothing else — see Install. And an organisation that cannot send its coordinates to a third party does not have to.

What it is not

• Not a data source. It draws what a query returns; it does not fetch anything itself.
• Not a reimplementation of kepler.gl. It embeds the real library. Every layer setting, colour palette, filter and interaction you find in kepler's own documentation is present in the panel. See Differences from stock kepler.gl for the small number of places where the panel departs from it.
• Not a reprojection engine. It renders WGS84 (EPSG:4326) longitude/latitude only. A source that hands you projected metres must be asked for WGS84 — see Infinity → WFS.

How it compares to Geomap

Grafana ships a built-in Geomap panel, and for a lot of jobs it is the right answer: it is signed, in every install, and light. Reach for this panel instead when you need something Geomap does not do.

	Geomap	This panel
Rendering	OpenLayers	deck.gl on WebGL
Trajectory animation	—	Automatic Trip layer with a playback timeline
Origin–destination flows	—	Automatic animated flow layers
Velocity fields	—	Streamlines traced from a grid, re-traced as you zoom
Aggregation	Heatmap	Heatmap, grid, hexbin, cluster, H3, S2
Geometry input	GeoJSON	GeoJSON, WKT, raw WKB/EWKB
Layer styling	Panel options	kepler's full layer panel, saved with the dashboard
3D	—	Extrusion, tilt, and base maps with real elevation
In the catalog	Built in	Submitted, awaiting review — see Install

Geomap is the lighter tool and it is already there. This one is what you want when the data is moving, when there is a lot of it, or when the styling has to go further than a panel option list.

Already have a kepler.gl map?

Maps built in kepler.gl's own demo app, in Dekart or in Foursquare Studio all export the same KeplerGlSchema JSON, and this panel accepts it. See Coming from another kepler.gl tool for bringing one across and the two conventions worth knowing first.

Status

Version 1.0, submitted to the Grafana plugin catalog and awaiting review, and pinned to a kepler.gl pre-release because the Flow layer exists nowhere else. See Compatibility for the supported Grafana versions and the catalog and signing status.