Book Image

Building IoT Visualizations using Grafana

By : Rodrigo Juan Hernández
5 (1)
Book Image

Building IoT Visualizations using Grafana

5 (1)
By: Rodrigo Juan Hernández

Overview of this book

Grafana is a powerful open source software that helps you to visualize and analyze data gathered from various sources. It allows you to share valuable information through unclouded dashboards, run analytics, and send notifications. Building IoT Visualizations Using Grafana offers how-to procedures, useful resources, and advice that will help you to implement IoT solutions with confidence. You’ll begin by installing and configuring Grafana according to your needs. Next, you’ll acquire the skills needed to implement your own IoT system using communication brokers, databases, and metric management systems, as well as integrate everything with Grafana. You’ll learn to collect data from IoT devices and store it in databases, as well as discover how to connect databases to Grafana, make queries, and build insightful dashboards. Finally, the book will help you implement analytics for visualizing data, performing automation, and delivering notifications. By the end of this Grafana book, you’ll be able to build insightful dashboards, perform analytics, and deliver notifications that apply to IoT and IT systems.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Meeting Grafana
4
Part 2: Collecting Data from IoT Devices
8
Part 3: Connecting Data Sources and Building Dashboards
12
Part 4: Performing Analytics and Notifications
15
Part 5: Integrating Grafana with Other Platforms

What is a data source?

A data source is just a resource that Grafana uses to obtain the data.

Then, Grafana uses this data to perform visualizations, transformations, and analytics. You can control every aspect of this process from the web interface of Grafana.

So, data sources are data repositories that Grafana can access through its API.

There are different types of data sources, and the list is always growing. To connect to the data sources, Grafana uses plugins (we will see how to connect to data sources in Part 3).

Let’s see some data sources available to use with Grafana:

  • MySQL
  • MongoDB
  • Graphite
  • InfluxDB
  • OpenTSDB
  • PostgreSQL
  • Elasticsearch
  • Azure Monitor
  • Prometheus
  • Loki
  • Test data
  • CSV files and Excel files

This is just a short list of data sources. You can find all the available data sources at https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/?type=datasource.

To navigate and explore the data source plugins installed...