Grafana dashboard

Introduction

• 

  From the left menu choose Data sources.

• 
• 

  Finally the infinity after installing the plugin. Note the permissions of the folders.

• 

  Creating a Dashboard is an easy task.

• 

  Add the csv

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  Add the csv file from localhost using nginx.

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  The Table works for the provided URL.

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  You can rename the fields and choose the one to be displayed

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  Convert field types to numeric. It likes to have them as strings.

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  Divide the time by 1000 to convert from ms to seconds.

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  Finally the xy-plot works. Note the change of axis.

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  Set autoupdate. Note that zooming is lost.

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  Set headers!

Grafana is a open source analytics application. It can produce charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.

• https://github.com/grafana/grafana
• https://grafana.com/get/
• https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/setup-grafana/installation/

Running Grafana

1. Start Grafana server (grafana-server.exe). My installation is at C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\grafana\bin
2. Use web browser to go to http://localhost:3000/login
   • Default name and pwd is admin
3. Create a data source. Connections -> Data sources. Enter Infinity
   • However, the plugin needs to be installed first: grafana-cli plugins install yesoreyeram-infinity-datasource. The permission of the folders have to be changed. Perhaps should allow all. Then restart grafana by:
     1. Open the Services app.
     2. Right-click on the Grafana service.
     3. In the context menu, click Restart.
4. Create a dashboard
5. Add visualization. Add the yesoreyeram-infinity-datasource data source
   • In the query section at the bottom, choose Type: CSV.
     1. Ensure the source is URL and the method is GET.
     2. For the URL, enter https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/developer-advocacy/refs/heads/main/projects/Visualize%20CSV/data/worldcities.csv, which links to a CSV file full of data about world cities and their locations.
     3. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen, choose Table as the visualization type.
6. Map is actually Geomap.

Examples

CSV Data

• https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/yesoreyeram-infinity-datasource/ Visualize data from JSON, CSV, XML, GraphQL and HTML endpoints.
  • https://grafana.com/blog/2025/02/05/how-to-visualize-csv-data-with-grafana/
  • Documentation https://grafana.com/docs/plugins/yesoreyeram-infinity-datasource/latest/
  • CSV Docs https://grafana.com/docs/plugins/yesoreyeram-infinity-datasource/latest/csv/
• https://grafana.com/docs/plugins/marcusolsson-csv-datasource/latest/ in maintenance mode

GIS

• 

  Change Auto to Lat Long if not working.

• Caption2

  Caption2

Geomap

JSON data

Need to have stream of JSON

The following array works, but there is the problem with brackets.

[{
  "name": "John",
  "age": 30,
  "city": "New York"
},
{
  "name": "Jussi",
  "age": 32,
  "city": "New York C"
}]

Window functions

https://community.grafana.com/t/grafana-v11-0-0-why-windows-function-mode-is-missing-in-data-transformation-menu/129571

Logs from Serial port

RealTerm: Serial/TCP Terminal (https://sourceforge.net/projects/realterm/) by Crun is a rather easy and good behaving serial port logger with timestamps. It also shows the name of peripheral attached to the COM (USB) port. It can show also the I2C data.

Putty: cannot add the timestamp. There are some extraplugins, but I will skip those. Use PuTTY and save (stream) logs to a file. Works like a charm. The notepad++ can be set to update automatically without asking (Ctrl-R reloads the file) by using Settings -> Preferences -> MISC. -> Update silently, but it still need Ctrl-R to reload the file.

However, Grafana cannot update a local file. Instead use a web server (eg nginx) to serve the CSV files over http and then use http url (eg http://localhost/my-csv-app/my-csv-file.csv).

NGinx

See https://medium.com/@jasonrigden/how-to-host-a-static-website-with-nginx-8b2dd0c5b301

• Download, run
  • start nginx and check with tasklist.exe. It should show two nginx instances. One of the processes is the master process and another is the worker process.
• Goto address http://localhost/ and the file location is at nginx -> html.
• Check config.
  • nginx.conf is important. See location which states that root is html.