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Grafana

documentation/integrations/visualization/grafana.md

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import Screenshot from "@theme/Screenshot"

Grafana is a popular observability and monitoring application used to visualize data and enable time-series data analysis.

QuestDB is available within Grafana via the official QuestDB plugin.

:::warning QuestDB can also be used with the PostgreSQL Grafana plugin, but the configuration options are different in that case. The QuestDB official plugin is strongly recommended instead. :::

For a walk-through style guide, see our blog post.

Prerequisites

  • Docker to run both Grafana and QuestDB
    • We will use the --add-host parameter for both Grafana and QuestDB.

Start Grafana

Start Grafana using docker run:

shell
docker run --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway \
-p 3000:3000 --name=grafana \
-v grafana-storage:/var/lib/grafana \
grafana/grafana-oss

Once the Grafana server has started, you can access it via port 3000 (http://localhost:3000). The default login credentials are as follows:

shell
user:admin
password:admin

Start QuestDB

The Docker version runs on port 8812 for the database connection and port 9000 for the Web Console and REST interface:

shell
docker run --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway \
-p 9000:9000 -p 9009:9009 -p 8812:8812 -p 9003:9003 \
-v "$(pwd):/var/lib/questdb" \
-e QDB_PG_READONLY_USER_ENABLED=true \
questdb/questdb:latest

Add a data source

  1. Open Grafana's UI (by default available at http://localhost:3000)
  2. Navigate to the bottom of the page and click Find more data source plugins.
  3. Search for QuestDB and click Install.
  4. Once the QuestDB data source for Grafana is finished installing, click on the blue Add new data source button where the Install button used to be.
  5. Enter the connection settings.
    1. Notice that Server Address is the host address without the port. Some common values are host.docker.internal when using Docker on the same host, localhost when running standalone Grafana on the same host, or the QuestDB instance IP address when running Grafana remotely.
    2. The port, which defaults to 8812 is passed as a separate parameter.
    3. For QuestDB Open Source, TLS/SSL mode should be disable. This can be left empty for QuestDB Enterprise.
Server address: host.docker.internal
Server port: 8812
Username: user
Password: quest
TLS/SSL mode: disable

  1. Toggle the Query Builder to SQL Editor by clicking the button.

  2. Write SQL queries!

<Screenshot alt="Screenshot of a blank panel after being created" src="images/blog/2023-04-12/blank-panel.webp" jumbo={true} />

Real-time refresh rates

By default, Grafana limits the maximum refresh rate of your dashboards. The maximum default rate is to refresh every 5 seconds. This is to provide relief to the database under-the-hood. However, with QuestBD's significant performance optimizations, we can lower this rate for greater fluidity.

To learn how, see our blog post.

Global variables

Use global variables to simplify queries with dynamic elements such as date range filters.

$__timeFilter(timestamp)

This variable allows filtering results by sending a start-time and end-time to QuestDB. This expression evaluates to:

questdb-sql
timestamp BETWEEN
    '2018-02-01T00:00:00Z' AND '2018-02-28T23:59:59Z'

$__interval

This variable calculates a dynamic interval based on the time range applied to the dashboard. By using this function, the sampling interval changes automatically as the user zooms in and out of the panel.

questdb-sql
SELECT
  timestamp AS time,
  avg(price) AS avg_price
FROM trades
WHERE $__timeFilter(timestamp)
SAMPLE BY $__interval;

See also