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Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

I have had some good success using Grafana to visualize live data from a fleet of robots - I started out with graphite as the data store but quickly moved to InfluxDB which had better performance. Overall it was a very impressive tool which required little set up and configuration!

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Thanks Roland! For those out there with Graphite performance issue, Grafana Labs also develops an open source, Graphite compatible, performant and horizontally scalable TSDB called Metrictank. https://github.com/grafana/metrictank

I'll have to check that out! Graphite was definitely easy to set up and is a bit simpler to understand than a lot of other time-based databases.

I came to Grafana via InfluxDB, been running it for system metrics for around 4 years now and it's been a real workhorse. Collecting metrics from around 100 machines using telegraf, presenting in Grafana.

Load significantly dropped when I shut off Carbon/Graphite after moving to InfluxDB.

We started with graphite, then moved to go-carbon + carbonapi. Replacing the python stuff with those two services made everything much faster - I think we had something like 1200 hosts submitting metrics every 30 seconds. So not a huge installation.

We've had the opposite experience - it's been slow, clunky, and hard to learn/teach. Of course, seeing some of the other things the former admin/advocate for it did after she left, I'm not sure it's Grafana's fault.

As far as this type of tool goes Grafana is pretty solid. It might be easy to conflate it with the datasource it is pulling from.

Yeah, we’re trying to make datasource query latency more obvious soon. It’s too easy to say Grafana is slow right now. We want users to make better decisions on what to optimize in their monitoring stack. That being said, dashboard search can be slow on bigger instances. But we’re working on it.

Does Grafana update fast enough for visualizing data from sensors on robots? (in particular for tracking positional information or response information if tuning/monitoring PIDs etc.)?

Director of UX here. This year we rewrote a lot of the data flow plumbing in grafana to allow streaming with the very goal to enable sensor and other high frequency use cases. More to come soon

Very cool, anywhere I can read up more on this?

How much of those improvements is in current versions of Grafana? I've tried building some dashboards in Chronograf for some data I work with, but there's a lot of sensors that update very quickly so the graphs basically killed the browser tab. If Grafana is better at handling that sort of use case I'll definitely check it out.

Grafana was pretty fast, but the total system latency can add up to about 1 second or so (wifi at least, cellular is longer).

We did not use grafana for debugging instantaneous, fast events, but it was fantastic for things like monitoring temperature, current modes, and running statistics.

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