Anyone using Grafana?
One of my colleagues recently came across Grafana, and showed me a demo of it with PI data. There is a PI Web API datasource plugin for Grafana.
This was a nice find, John. I went to Grafana's web site yesterday and tried searching on "OSIsoft", "OSI", and later just "PI". Got zero hits.
Hi Bill. I have tested the Plugin and it works fine in both Grafana architecture (local or SaaS) and the result is pretty interesting.
I would love to have some of their features in PI Vision such as:
- event frame in trends
- alarming highlighting the trend or the object
- the discrete panel showing the status of a tag over a period
- donut...
Here below my dashboards all connected to PI AF and Event Frames (sorry for the colors, I did not focus on that) :
How to setting configure to PI Server?
This needs to connect to a PI WebAPI endpoint to get data from PI. You will need to specify the URL of your PI WebAPI instance - typically looks like https://myserver/piwebapi. You also need to indicate how the plugin will authenticate to the PI WebAPI under the Auth settings section.
Haven't actually configured this myself, but from the screenshot the settings look pretty straightforward.
I've been testing it a bit, some findings below:
- I had problems to get authentication work between Grafana plugin and PI WebAPI. In the end I just wrote a very simple web proxy of my own, sitting between Grafana and PI WebAPI adding Kerberos authentication to HTTP requests
- Adding panels and setting up queries is very easy after you get connections going
- Data provider plugin has some bugs in it and community seems to be a bit slow on fixing them.
- Summary & Summary period configuration functionality had a bug in it, stopping me initially from using Averaging etc. I fixed the code myself, later on I found a forked version from GIT with a fix
Overall I think it's a really good tool for right use cases.
- Live, view-only dashboards for wide audiences
- Embedding individual PI data charts on other websites by using panel sharing is very handy
We are having some challenges around the implementation of active directory based security through the PIwebapi. We can secure the PIwebAPI with Kerberos but cannot seem to link this back up to Grafana. Could you let me know how you solved the problem and how your web proxy works?
Oh wow, how did I miss this post.
I've been using Grafana for a long while. I've written a few plugins too including one for OCS.
Grafana is great for typical monitoring scenarios, but it lacks a bit of finesse for some scenarios (like Alerts/KPIs/schematics).
It does have a great community behind it though, much like PI Square.
The sticky point is that everything relies heavily of custom plugins, which may or may not be well supported.
HI
Anyone used Worldmap Panel plugin for Grafana | Grafana Labs ?
My Element name is Device01 and this has 2 attributes (Latitude & Longitude).
Grafana supports many different storage backends for time series data but PI Data Archive is not one of them.
If you are looking for visualization options with the PI System you should use PI Vision (previously named PI Coresight) to trend, chart and perform ad hoc analysis on PI System data.
Customization in PI Vision are available through extensiblility .
Upcoming webinar: A Sneak Peek into the PI Vision 4 Extensibility Model