Should I choose Grafana for IoT kind of dashboard

1

HI All,
I just got introduced to Grafana when doing a research for my upcoming website. My team is currently evaluating a various technology stack and have few questions around using Grafana. To keep it simple consider our application as IoT platform where several sensors are sending data over a timeperiod and we will plot various graphs which are grouped by certain categories. We will have application layer will manage the user access, sensor grouping etc, and we plan to use Grafana for the charting needs. Few questions we have:

  • Is grafana right choice for such solutions (or should we just got with basic graphs)?
  • Does Grafana provide any kind of widgets Which I can embed into my website?
  • In few forums I read we can use iFrame but this would be challenging as we plan to develop interactive application targeting various resolution. Are there any solutions which grafans provides for this?
  • Are there any good live examples where I can view Grafana being used in public domain?
    Regards,
    Mahesh
2

Yes, Grafana is great for charting IoT timeseries data. But it sounds like you’ll want to embed Grafana charts in another UI, which you will likely not find to be a particularly satisfying solution in the longer term. Indeed, embedding the individual charts using iframes would be the most practical way to do it - and generally works well for simple use cases - but also has its limitations.

For me, Grafana’s true power comes through when used as a full dashboarding solution - with programmatic deployment, templating, flexible layouts, etc. If you just need something to generate individual charts that will be embedded in another UI, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere.

Either way, check out https://play.grafana.org/ for a live example.