grafana/docs/sources/plugins/panels.md

---
page_title: Plugin panel
page_description: Panel plugins for Grafana
page_keywords: grafana, plugins, documentation
---

 > Our goal is not to have a very extensive documentation but rather have actual code that people can look at. An example implementation of a datasource can be found in the grafana repo under /examples/panel-boilerplate-es5

# Panels

To interact with the rest of grafana the panel plugin need to export a class in the module.js.
This class have to inherit from sdk.PanelCtrl or sdk.MetricsPanelCtrl and be exported as PanelCtrl.

```javascript
  return {
    PanelCtrl: BoilerPlatePanelCtrl
  };
```

This class will be instancieted once for every panel of its kind in a dashboard and treated as an AngularJs controller.

## MetricsPanelCtrl or PanelCtrl

MetricsPanelCtrl inherits from PanelCtrl and adds some common features for datasource usage. So if your Panel will be working with a datasource you should inherit from MetricsPanelCtrl. If dont need to access any datasource then you should inherit from PanelCtrl instead.

## Implementing a MetricsPanelCtrl

If you choose to inherit from MetricsPanelCtrl you should implement a function called refreshData that will be called by grafana when its time for all panels to get new data.