A Grafana datasource plugin for FIWARE context brokers
An important ingredient of the Cognitive Automation Platform (CAP) specified by the CAPRI consortium is the visualization layer, which allows for the creation of dashboards showing important process characteristics to the plant operator and other stakeholders [1]. Two well-known open-source dashboarding solutions recommended by CAPRI are the Grafana platform and Apache Superset.
The realization of dashboards for the CAP with these tools is currently not very comfortable, though, because a standardized integration of the FIWARE context broker into these tools is still missing. Therefore, documented best practices refer to an integration at the database level, which requires more setup and effort by the integrator and make it harder for end users to create their own dashboards.
To overcome this situation for the Grafana platform, a so-called datasource plugin has been developed by consortium member BFI, which allows for the direct use of an NGSI-LD compatible FIWARE context broker [2] as a data source in Grafana. It supports four different query types, i.e., timeseries/historical data, current values, geographical data for map visualizations and graph data for node graphs. The screenshots below show the configuration menus for timeseries and map queries, respectively. Filters for datapoints are based on the NGSI-LD concepts of entity types, entity ids and attributes, so that only a basic knowledge of the FIWARE data modeling approach is required by the user.
The ngsild-grafana-datasource plugin has been published under the permissive open-source Apache license on Github [3].
References:
[1] Salis, A. et al.: An Edge-Cloud based Reference Architecture to support cognitive solutions in the Process Industry (2022). https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06622
[2] ETSI, cross-cutting Context Information Management (CIM); NGSI-LD API v.1.6.1 (2022), https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gs/CIM/001_099/009/01.06.01_60/gs_CIM009v010601p.pdf
[3] BFI, ngsild-grafana-datasource (software), https://github.com/bfi-de/ngsild-grafana-datasource
