Master Grafana’s Alibaba Cloud OpenAPI Plugin: Installation & Quick‑Start Guide

Overview

Grafana plugin for Alibaba Cloud OpenAPI enables Grafana to call Alibaba Cloud product APIs directly, retrieve metrics or resource data, and visualize them.

Installation

For managed Grafana on Alibaba Cloud (version ≥ 9.0.x) the plugin is pre‑installed. For self‑hosted Grafana download the release package from the GitHub repository and extract it into grafana/plugins.

GitHub repository: https://github.com/alibabacloud-observability/aliyun-openapi-grafana-datasource-plugin

Enable the unsigned plugin by adding to grafana.ini and restarting Grafana:

[plugins]
allow_loading_unsigned_plugins = aliyun-openapi-grafana-datasource-plugin

Data Source Configuration

In Grafana → Configuration → Data Sources, add a new “OpenAPI” data source and set the following fields:

Name : arbitrary identifier.

AccessKeyId / AccessKeySecret : RAM user credentials that have OpenAPI permission.

Product : Alibaba Cloud product name (e.g., ecs, rds).

Endpoint : service address of the product’s OpenAPI, may contain [regionId] placeholder.

Version : API version as documented.

Style : request style (e.g., ROCKET, RPC).

Query Configuration

The query editor has three tabs.

Action : specify Product, HTTP Method (POST or GET), Action (API name), and optionally PathName for RPC style.

Params : add required request parameters and values.

Fields : define JSON parsing. Use $ to refer to the whole payload, select the data type (default Auto), and optionally set an alias for each column.

Time‑Series Panel

When creating a Time Series visualization, the query must return a field that can be parsed as an ISO‑8601 timestamp (set field type to Time) and a numeric field (set type to Number). Grafana will then plot the values over time, e.g., using the ListAlerts API to show alert recovery trends.

Example Dashboard

After saving and testing the data source, a ready‑made dashboard can be accessed at:

https://demo.grafana.aliyuncs.com/d/uid_for_demo_home/openapi-home?orgId=1

Reference Links

RAM AccessKey documentation: https://help.aliyun.com/zh/ram/user-guide/view-the-accesskey-pairs-of-a-ram-user#task-187540

Plugin Architecture

Data Source Configuration Example