Places by geohash or by name

A query does not need a latitude and a longitude to be drawn as points. It can give a geohash, or a place name or code the panel looks up. Either way the rows gain a position, and with it anything a pair of coordinates allows: a Point layer, a heatmap, an aggregation. A geohash query is drawn as its cells to begin with.

Both are used only when the query has no coordinates of its own.

Geohash

A column named geohash is decoded to the centre of its cell; any other column can be pointed at with Field mapping → Geohash. Elasticsearch and OpenSearch geohash grid aggregations return exactly this.

SELECT geohash, count(*) AS events FROM readings GROUP BY geohash;

A value that is not a geohash gives the row no position.

With no saved map, such a query is drawn as its cells: a GeoHash layer, one rectangle per geohash, and no dots. The centres stay in the dataset, so a Point or Heatmap layer added by hand draws them, and click variables read them. See geohash.

Place names and codes

A column named lookup, or the one chosen in Field mapping → Place name, is looked up in a gazetteer, chosen under Map → Place names:

Gazetteer	Looked up by
Countries (default)	name, or the 2- or 3-letter ISO code: Ecuador, EC, ECU
US states	name or postal code: Texas, TX
Airports	IATA or ICAO code: UIO, SEQM
A URL of your own	see below

Matching is exact, or the same in upper case. The point is the place's centre — a country's centroid, not its outline.

SELECT country_code AS lookup, sum(sales) AS sales FROM orders GROUP BY 1;

The three gazetteers are the ones Grafana ships, served by your own Grafana; nothing is fetched from elsewhere. The file is only downloaded when a query names places, once per dashboard.

Your own gazetteer

Type its address in Place names. Two shapes are read, the same two Geomap reads:

• a list of { "key" or "keys", "name", "latitude", "longitude" }, matched by key, keys or name;
• a GeoJSON FeatureCollection, matched by the properties named id, uid, key or code, or ending in _id or _code (otherwise its first text property), and placed at the feature's point or at the middle of its extent.

A relative address is resolved against Grafana's root, as Geomap's are. A file that fails to load leaves the rows unplaced, and says why in the browser console.

Rows with an unknown place

They stay in the dataset — in the table, the filters and the tooltip — but have no position, so no layer draws them.