We will use Grafana, a popular open source tool for dashboards, to connect to your QuestDB instance and displaying near real time dashboards. We will use the grafana postgresql connector to connect to QuestDB.

Even if you already have a working grafana installation, it is recommended to start a new one via docker, as the process will provisioning sample connections and dashboards. If you prefer to provision a data source and a dashboard by hand, skip this section and proceed to "Manual Provisioning"

Make sure you are at the dashboard/grafana directory before starting the grafana container. On starting, the contents of the ./home_folder will be used for provisioning sample dashboards, so it is important you start from the right relative directory.

Note: The following command uses the env_variables file to configure your grafana. It uses the default for a brand new local installation of QuestDB. If you are not running QuestDB on the local host, you need to edit that file and change host/port/user/password as needed. For users of QuestDB cloud you need to make sure you change the value of the QDB_SSL_MODE variable on that file from disable to require.

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 --name=grafana-quickstart --user "$(id -u)" --volume "$PWD/home_dir/var_lib_grafana:/var/lib/grafana" --volume "$PWD/home_dir/etc_grafana:/etc/grafana/"  --env-file ./env_variables grafana/grafana-oss

You can now navigate to http://localhost:3000/d/qdb-ilp-demo/device-data-questdb-demo?orgId=1&refresh=5s using the user demo and password quest to see a live grafana dashboard. Assuming you are running the IoT example provided for Python, Go, or JAVA, you should see the charts being updated every 5 seconds.

Feel free to explore Grafana. Both this sample dashboard and a datasource named qdb are automatically created.

When you want to stop your docker container you can run:

docker stop grafana-quickstart

And if you want to remove the docker container (and optionally the image) from your drive, execute:

docker rm grafana-quickstart
docker rmi grafana/grafana-oss

The rest of this README will explain how to manually provision your Grafana.

In your grafana, find the data sources icon on the left menu and add a new one. Choose the QuestDB type. Note that if you didn't start via Docker, you might have to first search for the QuuestDB type and Install it from the "Add New Connection" option in the UI.

You can enter any name you want, for example qdb, for host you need to enter * when running grafana locally (no docker) in the same machine where QuestDB is running: localhost:8812 * when running grafana via docker, in the same machine where QuestDB is running: host.docker.internal:8812 * when running QuestDB remotely, make sure you enter host and port accordingly.

For user choose admin, password quest. Those are the default values for a fresh QuestDB installation.

Out of the box, QuestDB Open Source does not support TLS/SSL, so we need to select disable for TLS/SSL Mode, unless when using QuestDB Enterprise, in which case you need to select require.

Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on Save & Test. You should see the connection is working.

From here on, you could create your own dashboards and charts by following this post.

However, if you prefer it, you can import the sample dashboard located at /dashboard/grafana/home_dir/data/dashboards/DeviceData-QuestDBDemo.json in this repository. To import it, find the dashboard>import option on the left menu of your local grafana, and then select the json file. The dashboard will try to use a connection named qdb.