Allow end users to compare measurements from nodes from a list with a checkbox or geomap

  • What Grafana version and what operating system are you using?
    grafana 9.x

  • What are you trying to achieve?
    in a dashboard with ~ 20 nodes i find no intuitive way to allow end users to select a 2 or more of those 20 nodes to allow to compare them within the same panel.
    it is currently possible to select a single item to be displayed based on a template variable:


    or all nodes can be shown, after which a user can deselect / select graphs from the legenda by using the [ctrl] mouse combo:

    most users tell me this is not intuitive.
    however, if there is a map / list with nodes and checkboxes the users could select i feel it would solve that gap. (something like a comparison flow in a product shop)
    i hope this clarifies what i want.

1 Like

Hi. Not sure if this helps but I’ve done something similar using Grafana dashboard with it’s Vertica Grafana datasource plugin. I think this will depend on the plugin you are using and if it supports the notion of something like our $__expandMultiString macro.

I set up a dashboard variable “mynodes” with definition “select node_name from nodes” and selected multi-value and Include All option, order by Alpha asc

Then in my panel query I use the query below noting the $__expandMultiString macro and passing it the variable name
SELECT
$__time(end_time), node_name, READ_KBYTES_PER_SEC
FROM
v_monitor.io_usage
WHERE
$__timeFilter(end_time) and node_name in ($__expandMultiString(‘${mynodes}’))
ORDER BY
time

This gives me a select pull down in the panel that gives me the ability to select one, multiple, or all nodes as a filter

thx for your suggestion. your variable suggestion does not exist for sql based datasources.
the loink as shown here does have an option to filter:

i think it’s a reasonable match; however that example uses worldmap and that plugin seems deprecated.
perhaps better then to open a github feature request to restore the worldmap feature of filtering into the new grafana geomap ?

Tobias.