How We Built Our Grafana Datasource Plugin for Cloud Dependency Monitoring

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> Unfortunately, the fee ended up being so cost prohibitive that it was out of reach for us as a small startup company and we had to abandon our catalog and cloud ambitions.

Well, yes. In 2018 I created a datasource plugin for ClickHouse [1], and back then it was just a matter of creating a PR to Grafana's repo. Now, we created a plugin (also open source) for VictoriaMetrics [2], and the signing fee has become a concern. Worth to mention that, as I understand, it is an annual fee.

I totally understand that, as a marketplace owner, Grafana Labs has all the rights to decide what to do with it. But it indeed looks like a roadblock for 3rd party development.

[1] - https://github.com/Altinity/clickhouse-grafana

[2] - https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/grafana-datasource

Our company is the maintainer of the excellent work from hagen1778 and we've also bumped into the fee issue even with pure open source work. Grafana has gone back and forth on their policies over the last few years. At this time there do not seem to be problems with open source plugins to open source products (e.g., ClickHouse) and we don't have issues posting new releases.

One thing that does seem to have changed was that it was formerly pretty easy to see the number of downloads on Grafana plugins regardless of source. The last time I saw this data it was something like 8M downloads for the aforesaid ClickHouse plugin. I can't find it now, so it's possible Grafana has changed their policies on this. It makes it hard to judge the popularity of community plugins.