Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

blog.thecloudside.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 31 posts

Re: Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

#11

Post by geuis »

I’ve had a basic influxdb/grafana setup going for a year or so. Despite having worked with it for a while, I always am left with the feeling that I’m missing something.

The sql-like language is similar enough that it’s confusing. And I’m still not sure why a dedicated time series database is supposed to be better than using standard mysql/postgres with inserts. At least the you get a wider range of options for data types, indexing, and querying.

I’m likely still not in the correct mindset but not sure what I’m missing.

Re: Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

#12

Post by PeterZaitsev »

If you like TICK stack but not impressed with what InfluxDB has in Open Source Version check out VictoriaMetrics

https://victoriametrics.com/

It supports InfluxDB Protocol and Telegraf Directly

https://docs.victoriametrics.com/#how-to-send-data-from-infl...

Re: Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

#13

Post by justin_oaks »

For some use cases, you wouldn't even need Grafana. You could use the graphing/visualization and alerting functionality built into the InfluxDB 2.0.

That said, Grafana is a more mature product. I can't fault anyone for using InfluxDB just as a time series database and using Grafana for visualization and alerting.

Re: Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

#14

Post by justin_oaks »

dijit wrote: post #6

If I have a regret in my observability stack I think it’s got to be influxdb. I bought in to the TICK stack and planned on using an enterprise support contract when going to production, but every interaction with InfluxData the company has felt a bit sleazy. Trying to push very hard to the cloud offering for example. That’s bad enough, but the documentation and observability of the database is quite poor, and it’s tr…

I looked into TimescaleDB, but didn't find a lot of support for monitoring agents that push data into Postgres. TimescaleDB is built on Postgres and uses the same mechanisms for ingesting data.

There's a plugin for Telegraf that looks promising, but it hasn't been merged yet.

Is anyone else using TimescaleDB? If so, what do you use to push monitoring data to it?

Re: Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

#15

Post by liketochill »

camtarn wrote: post #10
liketochill wrote: post #2

It is strange that there isn’t more overlap between tech software monitoring and metrics products and industrial historians and HMI products. Osisoft was purchased by Aveva/Schneider for 5 billion despite them already owning citect, wonderware, and probably 6 other historian products. The industrial historians solve the same problems - collect data at nodes that might have intermittent connectivity, send to a central…

Yes, agreed. This is basically what we do at my work: plot stuff from PLCs onto Grafana, while coping with intermittent connectivity. I'd love to buy a ready-made product that could do it, but there's literally nothing out there that quite comes close. As well as the things you identified, I suspect that there's just a lot of mistrust of open source in the industrial world - there's that whole thing of perceived valu…

Wonderware historian, inductive automation ignition, and osi pi all can buffer data at a collection or edge node that it collects from a Plc and then forward it on to the central database historian when connectivity is present. Grafana might have a better web ui but they all offer some client for plotting.

I am curious in what regard nothing comes close to grafana? I am Currently paying a lot for citect and wonderware support across a couple dozen facilities.

Re: Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

#17

Post by jimmySixDOF »

camtarn wrote: post #10
liketochill wrote: post #2

It is strange that there isn’t more overlap between tech software monitoring and metrics products and industrial historians and HMI products. Osisoft was purchased by Aveva/Schneider for 5 billion despite them already owning citect, wonderware, and probably 6 other historian products. The industrial historians solve the same problems - collect data at nodes that might have intermittent connectivity, send to a central…

Yes, agreed. This is basically what we do at my work: plot stuff from PLCs onto Grafana, while coping with intermittent connectivity. I'd love to buy a ready-made product that could do it, but there's literally nothing out there that quite comes close. As well as the things you identified, I suspect that there's just a lot of mistrust of open source in the industrial world - there's that whole thing of perceived valu…

A roll your own open source method works if you have a good low level understanding of what you are listening to and can organize your own alarm thresholds and groupings etc. Dealing with a large number of modbus/BACnet endpoints with vendor specific device profiles and PLC logic means the vendors backend systems will handle events and trend paterns better than what most facility teams can put together. However, the history retention data by itself will have more flexibility to do it yourself, I do agree with that.

Re: Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

#18

Post by tpxl »

geuis wrote: post #11

I’ve had a basic influxdb/grafana setup going for a year or so. Despite having worked with it for a while, I always am left with the feeling that I’m missing something. The sql-like language is similar enough that it’s confusing. And I’m still not sure why a dedicated time series database is supposed to be better than using standard mysql/postgres with inserts. At least the you get a wider range of options for data t…

> And I’m still not sure why a dedicated time series database is supposed to be better than using standard mysql/postgres with inserts

It's optimized for timeseries data, so queries and inserts may be faster and the storage requirements may be lower. Other than that, Postgres can probably do everything influx can do and more.

Re: Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

#19

Post by camtarn »

liketochill wrote: post #15
camtarn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, agreed. This is basically what we do at my work: plot stuff from PLCs onto Grafana, while coping with intermittent connectivity. I'd love to buy a ready-made product that could do it, but there's literally nothing out there that quite comes close. As well as the things you identified, I suspect that there's just a lot of mistrust of open source in the industrial world - there's that whole thing of perceived valu…

Wonderware historian, inductive automation ignition, and osi pi all can buffer data at a collection or edge node that it collects from a Plc and then forward it on to the central database historian when connectivity is present. Grafana might have a better web ui but they all offer some client for plotting. I am curious in what regard nothing comes close to grafana? I am Currently paying a lot for citect and wonderwar…

We're a bit of a weird case in that we log data at 20Hz and 100Hz for prototypes, so we need custom queries and/or aggregation to reduce that down for display. We had a good chat with Inductive earlier this year, but even they said that might be a bit much for them. Other than that, though, Ignition is literally everything we want in a single product.

Re: Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

#20

Post by dls2016 »

justin_oaks wrote: post #14
dijit wrote: post #6

If I have a regret in my observability stack I think it’s got to be influxdb. I bought in to the TICK stack and planned on using an enterprise support contract when going to production, but every interaction with InfluxData the company has felt a bit sleazy. Trying to push very hard to the cloud offering for example. That’s bad enough, but the documentation and observability of the database is quite poor, and it’s tr…

I looked into TimescaleDB, but didn't find a lot of support for monitoring agents that push data into Postgres. TimescaleDB is built on Postgres and uses the same mechanisms for ingesting data. There's a plugin for Telegraf that looks promising, but it hasn't been merged yet. Is anyone else using TimescaleDB? If so, what do you use to push monitoring data to it?

I recently built a janky system which runs nmon (plus a few custom rpi stats) every two minutes or so and pushes the output file to a watch folder. Another service uploads to server if network available. The server then ingests into timescale. Have been running it on two rpis and a few aws servers for the past few months.

Edit: I’m using grafana but was considering checking out apache superset.

Post reply on HN