Grafana
Grafana is an analytics and visualization platform. It connects to any datasource including databases and can create dashboards on top of them with visualizations and queries. A query describes how to get the data from the datasource and format it for the widget. The visualization just displays that data on the dashboard. You can build dashboards for insights and reporting on just about any data.
To connect Grandeur with Grafana, you have two options:
- JSON API plugin: it connects with Grandeur over the REST API and is good for infrequent fetching of large amounts of data, e.g., list of all devices to initialize the main page of your dashboard.
- MQTT plugin: it connects with Grandeur over MQTT and is perfect for showing live changes, for example, in a device variable.
Installation
To install these plugins in your instance, either click on Connect data from your instance's home page or from the left menu, go to Connections > Add new connection and search for JSON API and MQTT and click on them.
Configuration
After installing them, you need to configure JSON API and MQTT to connect with Grandeur. In the left menu, go to Connections > Data sources and click on Add new data source button.
First search for the JSON API. Clicking on it will create a new datasource and take you to its configuration page.
Fill the URL field with https://api.grandeur.tech.
In the Headers field, add the Authorization header and put your Auth token in it. To generate an Auth token for Grafana, go to Grandeur console's Access (opens in a new tab) tab.
In Query string, add your API key from Grandeur console's Access (opens in a new tab) page.
Click Save & test, if there are no errors, Grafana saves your datasource.
Now search for MQTT in Add new data source and click on it to open its configuration.
In the URI field, paste this url: tcp://mqtt.api.grandeur.tech.
Add your API key in the Username field and Auth token in the Password field.
Click Save & test, if Grafana can connect with Grandeur, it saves your datasource.
Building dashboards
After setting up JSON API and MQTT datasources, you are ready to build dashboards. Just go to Dashboards from the left menu and click on the New button to create a new dashboard.
Click on Add visualization to add your first visualization. This will open the visualziation's Edit panel. Select the Grandeur JSON from the Data source dropdown. This will open the options for the JSON API datasource below.
Path tab takes the endpoint you want to send request to. You can find a list of all endpoints here. To list all your devices registered in your project on Grandeur, you can enter devices/get here.
In the Fields tab, you can describe how to format the response coming from the Grandeur. $ shows the response as it is (in JSON). You can access fields inside the response with dot-notation like $.code or $.devices. Since $.devices is an array, you can select an individual element with $.devices[0] and all elements with $.devices[*].
Grandeur JSON based on the JSON API is ideal for infrequent fetching of large amounts of data, not for getting updates in realtime. For that, you can use the Grandeur MQTT. Add another visualization but select Grandeur MQTT datasource. MQTT needs only one thing: the topic. A topic consists of two parts, device ID and variable path joined by a forward slash like YOUR_DEVICE_ID/current. Once you type it in, the datasource subscribes to that topic on Grandeur and whenever there is an update, Grandeur forwards that to this datasource.
What's more
That's all for Grafana for now! We'll share more details soon.