Explore Grafana’s New Geomap Panel: Advanced Mapping Features & Customizations

1. Introduction

Grafana’s Worldmap panel has been widely used in OSS but has some hard‑to‑fix limitations.

With the release of Grafana v8.1, the new Geomap panel replaces Worldmap, allowing you to view and customize world maps with geospatial data while sharing the same core UI infrastructure.

Here we explore exciting Geomap features, including more customization, data‑layer definition, and the ability to share the same view across multiple Geomap panels on a dashboard. See the Geomap panel documentation for all options.

2. Multiple Base‑Layer Options

When creating a new dashboard, the Geomap panel looks like a regular panel but now offers several exciting options.

The panel includes multiple map‑layer choices such as OpenStreetMap, many ArcGIS options, and the default CartoDB tile set. You can also switch between light and dark themes for better visibility.

3. Easier Custom Markers

For data markers you can now choose a gradient scale to represent a range of points and change marker size based on the data.

The example shows flight counts and average prices per state; after selecting a color scheme, each marker’s size reflects the data point, and the legend shows the gradient or a single color/threshold.

You can also set min‑max values so each circle or marker is sized appropriately relative to the rest of the dataset. Six regular shapes are available, and future versions will add icon‑based markers.

4. Heatmap Layer

Above the marker layer, a heatmap layer aggregates points to visualize locations with different densities.

5. Data Layers

The data layer in the Geomap plugin determines how geospatial data is visualized on the base map. The data source automatically generates four mapping options: auto, coordinates (lat/lon), geohash, and lookup, giving you flexible ways to display your data.

6. New Sharing Feature

A new feature lets users link multiple map panels on the same dashboard. Panels can zoom/pan together, and the shared view option binds displays so multiple data layers can be explored across different maps.

Overall, the ability to customize map view settings, data styles, and separate data layers provides a more flexible, dynamic location‑based data visualization approach.

References

Grafana v8.1 release: https://grafana.com/blog/2021/08/05/grafana-8.1-released-new-geomap-and-annotations-panels-updated-plugin-management-and-more/

Geomap panel documentation: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/next/panels/visualizations/geomap/