Data visualization, like Grafana, but configurable without gui.

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨equidamoid@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I currently use Grafana to view how all sorts of stuff changes over time. It gets the job done, but is far from ideal:

edititng the data queries is intended to only be done in the web ui (so I end up just copypasting stuff to/from pycharm to at least have a nice text editor)
can’t store config in a git repo (yes, I can dump & restore the config as a huge json, but AFAIK the json structure is considered an internal api, so it can change at any time making versioning useless)
all plot parameters other than the data query have to be configured via gui

I did try grafanalib some time ago and it didn’t feel right. It was quite behind in plot types (Grafana screamed at me “don’t use this plot type, use the new one instead”), and is using unofficial api (the json config again).

Any suggestions? It doesn’t even have to be a ready-to-use tool, a library/framework for making dashboards will also do.

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popcorp@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I use grafanalib. I have a script that generates the dashboards depending on given parameters, then I store generated JSON as a k8s configmap that’s mounted into the directory that’s checked by grafana on startup. Might not be everyone’s cup of tea but it is good enough for me.

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- equidamoid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Did you ever notice that grafanalib is noticeable behind grafana itself? That’s something that turned me off it, but I wonder if it was a one-time situation because of some major change in grafana…
  
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nitrolife@rekabu.ru ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
You can configure grafana without gui. That explain in grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/…/provisioning/

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- equidamoid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  To be precise, the page how to configure some things and how to upload the config. I also tried that.
  
  The problem is in the dashboard jsons. They are not well documented (docs on specific plots are missing), and are a pain to edit (as any json). The grafanalib tool I mentioned tries to help with that by implementing a sort of DSL for dashboards, but it is not ideal.
  
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  - nitrolife@rekabu.ru ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You can create graph on the UI and then export to json. To be honest, it’s hard for me to imagine a situation where graphs need to be edited so often. After all, there are excellent template engines in Grafana itself. For quick look anyone can use Explore panel. Maybe I don’t have so much data…
    
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arjache@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It still has the limitations of JSON churn, but I find jsonnet to be a nice functional-style DSL in which to write grafana dashboards.

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yesbutnobutyesbutno@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Depending on what you’re comfortable with (and whether you want to integrate it with something else), maybe take a look at Altair? Especially nice is the declarative syntax of Vega-Altair.

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- equidamoid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Something like that, where I just write a function that spits out a numpy array or something like that and it gets plotted, would be great, but there is one thing Grafana can do and vega-altair, plotly and even matplotlib (*): a UI that allows to select a time interval to view. So I can freely pan/zoom in/out in time, and only the required part of the data will be loaded (with something like select … where time between X and Y under the hood). So if I look at a single day, it will only load that day, and only if I dare to zoom out too much it will spend some time loading everything from the last year.
  
  (*) yes, you can do interactive things with matplotlib, but you don’t really want to, unless you must…
  
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