Building IoT Visualizations using Grafana: Power up your IoT projects and monitor with Prometheus, LibreNMS, and Elasticsearch

Je découvre encore cet aspect du monitoring

Ein hervorragender Leitfaden für die Nutzung von Grafana. Von den ersten Schritten der Installation über die Verbindung mit Datenbanken (Plugins!) bis zum Erstellen von Dashboards mit den verschiedenen Möglichkeiten für Visualisierungen des OpenSource Tools Grafana. Auch fortgeschrittenere Techniken wie Filtern und Aggregieren von Daten werden beschrieben. Für die professionelle Nutzung von Alarmierungen liefert das Buch ebenfalls leicht verständliche Anleitungen, die einen schnellen Einsatz in der eigenen Installation ermöglichen. Benutzte Technologien werden stets auch kurz erklärt, sodass auch der nicht so erfahrene Benutzer die Abläufe in Grafana versteht. Ein sehr praxisnahes Buch, das endlich einen leichten Einstieg in die Verwendung von Grafana ermöglicht. Jeder, der IoT professionell einsetzt, sollte dieses Buch haben.

Just a great book that has added and enhanced knowledge to my 6 months working experience with Grafana.I come from an infrastructure, virtualisation, SAN background so whilst technical I do not come from a database or data presentation background. I have had a change of job role where I am working with LoRaWAN sensors / nodes and I have had to learn Grafana for my employment. It has been a steep learning curve and I wish I had “Building IoT Visualizations using Grafana” to assist me on that journey!Reading this book makes me realise that Rodrigo Juan Hernandez has done a fantastic job of stepping through the setup of Grafana in various scenarios, connecting data and authentication sources and presenting the information. This was stuff I had to learn by trial and error and with lots of web searching. All that self-learning is in this book and presented in a structured, methodical manner.In my employment I am accessing data from a Microsoft SQL database as my organisation already has appropriate enterprise licenses in that area. I am unfamiliar with InfluxDB and nonetheless, I have followed the instructions on InfluxDB from the book and it worked marvellously.I have used Timeline presentation of data extensively in the 6 months I have been using Grafana in anger and it is great referencing this book to get new ideas. This is because when you find a way, a method – you can use it a lot, and you can end up in a bit of a productivity rut. Sometimes, getting a new idea from an expert like Rodrigo is all you need to think “Yes I can do this a different way. A smarter way!”I have appreciated the advice on plugins within Grafana too. I have installed and added additional plugins but there are so many plugins to choose from. I have appreciated the proven recommendations within the book and they have helped improve my Grafana dashboards.I have found Chapter 10 useful as I have always found the Alerting and Notification within Grafana somewhat abstract. I have it working with e-mail and Teams notifications but I don’t think I ever understood the mechanics behind the design. Following the step-by-step instructions in the book brought my previously jumbled knowledge in this area together. As I say, I do not come from a SQL / database background so I appreciated the SQL examples to embellish knowledge.Reading on through the book, I liked the information and knowledge on other products such as OpenSearch and RabbitMQ. There is plenty of advice on Prometheus, a sister open-source product that can sit alongside Grafana. Whilst Prometheus is not a product I have worked with yet, reading the book has given me confidence that I can do it and that Prometheus is an appropriate tool to the kit that us IoT engineers need. I look forward to going through the worked examples within the book.All in all a heartily recommended book. I already have users in my work reviewing data gathered by LoRaWAN IoT sensors presented to them via Grafana. They are impressed with Grafana, my line management is impressed with Grafana and I am impressed with Grafana. Nonetheless, it has all been self-taught over the past 6 months and I know that the knowledge and guidance from ‘Building IoT Visualizations using Grafana’ will help me. This book will help me enhance the data offerings to my users, improve my own technical knowledge and ultimately help us all interpret more data from more sources in an informative way using open source software. What’s not to love?

I’m not sure if there’s a title that could be short enough to do this little book justice. It is far more than just a book on creating IoT visualizations with Grafana. It’s an excellent guide and reference manual for anyone interested in working with today’s most popular, open-source IoT tools. Hernandez covers the complete data gathering, analytics, reporting, and monitoring IoT lifecycle in this book with clear guides on how to achieve the type of IoT platforms in use today.What should you not expect to see in this book? There are no large IoT examples of use cases. Hernandez does not attempt to create elaborate scenarios or architectures. What he does is simply present tools common in the IoT and distributed system monitoring world, discuss at a high-level how these tools work, how they fit into the IoT or data gathering domain, and how to best use Grafana with these tools.In my opinion, this book is better because of its focus on the real world integration and less focused on the architecture and scenarios of IoT architectures. If you are looking for that type of book, I would recommend IoT and Edge Computing for Architects, Second Edition by Perry Lea. It’s pretty much everything you need to know to get a complete grounding in modern IoT Architecture.Part 1: Meeting GrafanaNo time is wasted on theory or long introductions, the book just dives into setting Grafana and exploring its capabilities. You will also learn the different versions of Grafana and how you can host it. Yes, there is a cloud version, but I think most people are still using on-premises installations. Personally, I love using it in Docker composed together with InfluxDB, Telegraf, and I also add Jupyter Labs to give me a workspace. The book covers how to set up Grafana on a Raspberry Pi and the route I typically take, which is the Docker path. Plugins are also covered, which is great because I learned I could connect Google Sheets and a few other sources using these plugins. Authentication is also covered, and Grafana supports a wide array of options here. I’m an Azure Architect, so I was glad to see Azure AD was an option.Part 2: Collecting DataThis is where you will get the most instruction on IoT. Here, all the various messaging protocols are covered, along with a bit of information on devices. You’ll also learn about all the various data sources supported, and there’s very important information related to working with Time Series Data and Time Series Databases. My favorite right now is InfluxDB, but there are many options. Again, Hernandez sticks closely with those products in the open-source, but if you work with specific environments like Google Cloud or AWS, you will likely know of similar platforms in those areas. So I think it was a smart decision to focus primarily on the open-source services and tools.Part 3: Connecting Data Sources and Building DashboardsThis is the part of the book where it feels like we’re getting to the promise of the title. Here we finally get to connect to some of our data sources and work with the data. Grafana is a reporting tool with a focus on graphics. It is designed for taking your data and telling a visual story with that data in a way that is meaningful for the intended audience. In this section, we learn how to connect to the various data sources we want to report on, as well as the plugins that will help us expand Grafana from its out-of-the-box functionality. Playlists are an interesting thing I discovered while reading this book, and now I have the desire to find a good reason to create a kiosk-style dashboard. I’ve seen them before in many operations centers, and I can see now how easy it would be to set one up.Part 4: Analytics and NotificationsHere you’ll learn about querying time series data, as well as the tools available for certain platforms. InfluxDB’s InfluxQL is covered, as well as Flux. If you’re familiar with SQL and some functions from SQL, it won’t be too difficult to understand how to create time series queries. This is just a short introduction to a pretty big subject, but there’s enough here to get you started. Alerting is interesting. It’s one of the things I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in a product like Grafana, but the tools it offers to manage alerts are definitely worth looking at.Part 5: Integrating with other PlatformsThis is probably one of my favorite sections, because it covered a few tools I was familiar with, but hadn’t spent a lot of time with. I now want to check out Home Assistant to see if it’s something I want to run in my home network.OverallHernandez’s book isn’t a large one by most technical book standards, but it doesn’t need to be, because the book has done a great job of introducing lots of tools and options in relation to Grafana. And Grafana looks to be one of those long-lasting products that continues to become an important part of any solution developer’s toolkit. Now that I’ve read the book, I plan to dive into my own little stack using InfluxDB and Telegraf to see what sort of visuals I can create with IoT data.

The author takes the reader through a detailed process of preparing an environment including installation and configuration to prepare the reading for setting up a Grafana environment including components like OpenTSDB. The author then pivots to the process of collecting data for and designing of dashboards within Grafana. As part of this process, the author explains key features of the graphing capabilities with good examples of key chart types. Using a logical progression, the author moves on to assembling individual components into dashboards and assembling routines.This book would be a great resource for someone new to Grafana as well as someone specifically interested in how Grafana can be a part of an IoT use case.