Glossary

Project-specific terms, acronyms, and codenames you will encounter in the codebase. General software terms (REST, gRPC, Redux, …) are not listed here.

Product concepts

• Dashboard — a JSON document holding a layout of panels, template variables, and time range. Stored in dashboard table, schema in kinds/dashboard/ and the new apps/dashboard/.
• Panel — a single visualization on a dashboard. Each panel has a type matching a panel plugin (timeseries, stat, table, etc.).
• Folder — container for dashboards. Permissions are typically set on folders, not individual dashboards. Implemented in pkg/services/folder/.
• Datasource — configured connection to a data backend (Prometheus, Loki, MySQL, …). Built-ins are in public/app/plugins/datasource/ (frontend) and pkg/tsdb/ (backend).
• DataFrame — Grafana's columnar data interchange format. Defined in packages/grafana-data/ (TS) and pkg/dataframe (Go via the Grafana plugin SDK).
• Explore — the ad-hoc query view (as opposed to a saved dashboard). Code under public/app/features/explore/.
• Alert rule — a query + condition + evaluation interval. Stored and evaluated by pkg/services/ngalert/.
• Contact point — a destination for alert notifications (email, Slack, PagerDuty, …) — known historically as a "notifier". Code lives under pkg/services/ngalert/notifier/.
• Notification policy — routing tree that decides which contact point an alert goes to. Stored in the Alertmanager config managed by ngalert.
• Public dashboard — a dashboard exposed without authentication via a token. Implemented in pkg/services/publicdashboards/.
• Library panel / library element — a panel definition shared across dashboards. See pkg/services/libraryelements/ and pkg/services/librarypanels/.
• Scenes — the new dashboarding framework, implemented as the @grafana/scenes external package and consumed by public/app/features/dashboard-scene/. Long-term replacement for the legacy Angular-rooted dashboard model.
• Trails / Drilldown — the metrics drilldown UX. See public/app/features/trails/.

Architectural terms

• OSS / Enterprise / Pro — Go build tags that gate features. The repo only contains OSS code; enterprise and pro fill in via build tags and a separate (private) source tree.
• App SDK / app-platform — the new Kubernetes-style API runtime. Apps live under apps/ and serve <group>/<version>/<resource> style endpoints alongside the legacy REST API.
• Unified storage — the storage layer behind app-platform resources, implemented in pkg/storage/ and pkg/services/apiserver/.
• Wire — Google's compile-time dependency injection generator. Service graph is declared in pkg/server/wire.go and generated to wire_gen.go.
• CUE / kinds — type definitions written in CUE under kinds/ and generated to Go + TS by make gen-cue. The Grafana way of having a single source of truth for cross-language schemas.
• Feature toggle — a runtime flag, listed in pkg/services/featuremgmt/registry.go. Some are stable, some experimental, some preview-only.
• Live channel — a Centrifuge pub/sub topic served over WebSocket from pkg/services/live/. Frontend subscribes via the LiveDataSource.
• Plugin SDK — the grafana-plugin-sdk-go library that backend datasource plugins implement against. Plugins talk to the host over gRPC.
• Sandbox — the iframe-based sandbox that executes untrusted plugin frontend code. Code under public/app/features/plugins/sandbox/.

Auth and access control

• Org — the original multi-tenancy unit in Grafana. A user has a role per org. See pkg/services/org/.
• RBAC — fine-grained role-based access control built on top of orgs. Implemented in pkg/services/accesscontrol/ — actions (dashboards:read), scopes (dashboards:uid:abc), and built-in plus custom roles.
• Service account — a non-user identity used by automation. Tokens issued via pkg/services/serviceaccounts/.
• AuthN / AuthZ — authentication is in pkg/services/authn/ (identity resolution from request to a *user.SignedInUser); authorization is in accesscontrol.
• Anonymous — a special unauthenticated identity controlled by auth.anonymous config and the pkg/services/anonymous/ service.

Frontend specifics

• Scenes — see above (product concept).
• RTK Query — Redux Toolkit's data fetching layer, used for most server-state code in public/app/features/.
• Slice — a Redux Toolkit slice. New Redux code uses slices, not the legacy connect-style reducers.
• Emotion / useStyles2 — the CSS-in-JS pattern. useStyles2(styles) returns a ClassRecord from a function that takes the current theme.
• Theme — see @grafana/data themes. Light/dark/extended themes for visual rendering.

Build and CI

• Lefthook — pre-commit hook runner, configured in lefthook.yml.
• Drone / GitHub Actions — CI orchestrators. Most jobs are GitHub Actions in .github/workflows/.
• Bra / Air — Go file watcher used for make run hot reload, configured by .air.toml.
• Nx — JS task runner used for affected-only builds across workspaces. Configured by nx.json and per-package project.json.