Using Grafana for submitting downlink commands

[Andreas]

Introduction

Within Maintenance mode galore, we rambled a bit about how to bring a maintenance mode to the Terkin appliance. A spin-off of this is a control component within Grafana – a thing I always wanted to create a dedicated topic for. So, here we are.

Research

1. Requests from the community

Others within the Grafana community are looking into the same direction. We collected some resources about corresponding requests and suggestions.

@Andreas

In the end, we would like to trigger that kinds of actions from Grafana itself without Medienbruch.

• MQTT Button plugin - Development - Grafana Community
• MQTT Data in HTML panel - Grafana Community
• Creating Toggle button Plugin - Grafana Community

More resources

• https://medium.com/worldsensing-techblog/build-your-iot-frontend-with-grafana-36b1113d7d4b
• Can Grafana act as control panel? - Grafana Plugin Development - Grafana Labs Community Forums
• Invoking "alert-success" toaster from Text html Panel - Grafana - Grafana Labs Community Forums
• IoT dashboard sends command to sensors - Grafana Labs Community Forums
• Insert data via plugin - Grafana Plugin Development - Grafana Labs Community Forums

Example screenshots

2. In the wild

Ryan McKinley already deployed such a “Field Display / Editor” component while working on the measurement and control system for Natel Energy. I found two short appearances within Ryan’s presentations.

• Running a Power Plant with Grafana – Ryan McKinley (Natel Energy)
• https://grafana.com/files/grafanacon_eu_2018/Ryan_McKinley_GrafanaCon_EU_2018.pdf, p. 37 ff.

Screenshots

[Andreas]

I’ve asked Ryan about the “Field Display / Editor” component depicted above.

Field Display/Editor panel

[Adelvalle62]

Dear @Ryantxu can you send some information related to the Field Display/Editor panel?
Regards

[Andreas]

Dear Adriano,

you should ask Ryan upstream within Field Display/Editor panel · Issue #2 · NatelEnergy/grafana-button-panel · GitHub. He is not a member of our forum.

Cheers,
Andreas.

[geeks-r-us]

Most examples i found make use of the text panel and add mqtt.js to connect to a server.
For a while this feature is blocked in favor of security from XSS.

This made me to create an own panel plugin which simply wraps the mqtt js code into a grafana plugin.
It offers 3 controls:

And allow to bind them to an mqtt server:
(striped due to limitation)

This is a first release an I expect there are still some issues to tackle.
Any feedback is welcome.

If you’re interested it can be found here:

geeks-r-us/mqtt-panel

[Andreas]

Dear @geeks-r-us,

thank you so much for starting this and telling us about it! The code looks pretty clear, we will definitively use this and eventually be able to contribute one or another bit.

I believe many people of the Grafana community have been waiting for something like that and currently solved it in an ad hoc manner by using the text panel, as you’ve outlined.

Cheers,
Andreas.

[Andreas]

Hi again,

just recently, we discovered the Volkov Labs Data Manipulation Panel for Grafana. It looks awesome.

With kind regards,
Andreas.