What is github-datasource?

The grafana/github-datasource plugin lets you pull data from your GitHub repositories and display it as charts, graphs, and panels inside Grafana dashboards. If your team already uses Grafana to monitor metrics and you want to see GitHub activity, like pull requests, issues, or commits, alongside your other data, this connects the two. Under the hood, it queries GitHub's API and translates the results into visualizations you can arrange on a dashboard. You can try a live demo on Grafana Play before installing anything. For Grafana Cloud users, there's an option to establish a private, secured connection to GitHub data sources inside a private network, which is useful if you're working with sensitive internal repositories. This is built for engineering managers, DevOps teams, or anyone who already lives in Grafana and wants GitHub context without switching tools. A practical use case: you could build a dashboard that shows deployment frequency alongside open pull requests and recent issues, giving you a single view of your development pipeline's health. You can also overlay GitHub events as annotations on existing time-series graphs, for instance, marking when a pull request was opened or closed directly on a performance chart. One notable tradeoff is caching. New pull requests, issues, or commits can take up to five minutes to appear because the plugin aggressively caches query results to avoid hitting GitHub's rate limits. The README also notes that the underlying GitHub API library it relies on is still under active development, so some behavior may evolve over time. There's flexibility in how annotations display: you can filter events by one time attribute (like "closed at") and position them on the graph using a different one, which helps when you want to see when something happened versus when it was resolved.