Feature Proposal: Text / Markdown Panel Type

[MikaelEngvall]

Problem

SigNoz has no panel type for displaying static text, section headers, or descriptions within a dashboard. When building complex dashboards with multiple logical sections (e.g., "Health-Check", "Infrastructure", "API Performance"), there's no way to add visual separators or labels.

Current workarounds:

• Use a Value panel with a disabled/empty query — only shows the panel title in the header bar, not a large readable label in the panel body
• No workaround for adding notes, instructions, or links to runbooks

Grafana solves this with "Text" panels and collapsible "Row" panels for organizing dashboard sections.

Proposed Solution

A new panel type (text) that renders user-provided content (plain text or markdown) without executing any query.

Use cases:

• Section headers to visually group related panels ("Health-Check", "Infrastructure")
• Dashboard instructions or operational notes
• Links to runbooks, wikis, or incident channels
• Changelog or last-updated annotations

Configuration:

{
  "panelType": "text",
  "content": "## Health-Check\nStatus of all monitored services.",
  "contentType": "markdown"
}

Behavior:

• No query builder shown for this panel type
• Panel body renders the content field as markdown (or plain text)
• Supports standard markdown: headings, bold, links, lists, code blocks
• Panel can be resized and positioned like any other panel

Technical Scope

• Frontend only — no backend changes required
• New simple React component (could use an existing markdown renderer library already in the bundle)
• Registered as panelTypes: "text"
• No query execution — the panel just renders static content from its config
• Minimal implementation: a textarea in settings, rendered output in the panel body

Willingness to Contribute

I'm happy to implement this and submit a PR. It's a small, self-contained feature. I'd appreciate guidance on:

• Whether there's a markdown renderer already in the frontend dependencies
• Preferred approach for the settings UI (textarea vs. live-preview editor)

[MikaelEngvall]

Following up from PR #12607 feedback — ready to implement this against the v2 architecture once we agree on the design.

Key question: how should a query-less panel be modelled?

Since PanelSpec.Queries is currently required and the panel editor mounts the query builder for every kind, there are a few approaches:

Option A: Make Queries optional

• Backend: Queries becomes omitempty
• Frontend: Panel editor skips query builder when definition.supportedQueryTypes is empty
• Cleanest long-term, but touches the core spec shape

Option B: Empty queries array

• Panel carries queries: [] — validates but has no queries
• Frontend: Renderer ignores queryResponse, renders plugin.spec.content directly
• Minimal backend change

Option C: Dedicated content field on PanelSpec

• TextPanelSpec { content: string, format: "markdown" | "plaintext" }
• Content lives in plugin.spec, no query involvement at all
• Frontend editor: new SectionKind with a textarea/markdown editor

I lean toward Option C — cleanest separation, matches how other panels store config in spec:

{
  "kind": "signoz/TextPanel",
  "spec": {
    "content": "# Section Header",
    "format": "markdown"
  }
}

Questions:

1. Does Option C work, or do you prefer A/B?
2. Should the panel editor still show the query tab (greyed out / hidden)?
3. Naming: signoz/TextPanel vs signoz/MarkdownPanel?
4. Should format support only markdown, or also HTML?

Happy to implement whichever direction you prefer.