Grafana Live overview

With Grafana Live, you can push event data to a frontend as soon as an event occurs.

This could be notifications about dashboard changes, new frames for rendered data, and so on. Live features can help eliminate a page reload or polling in many places, it can stream Internet of things (IOT) sensors or any other real-time data to panels.

Grafana Live sends data to clients over persistent WebSocket connection. Grafana frontend subscribes on channels to receive data which was published into that channel – in other words PUB/SUB mechanics is used. All subscriptions on a page multiplexed inside a single WebSocket connection. There are some rules regarding Live channel names – see .

Features

Having a way to send data to clients in real-time opens a road for new ways of data interaction and visualization. Below we describe Grafana Live features supported at the moment.

As soon as there is a change to the dashboard layout, it is automatically reflected on other devices connected to Grafana Live.

With Grafana Live, backend data source plugins can stream updates to frontend panels.

For data source plugin channels, Grafana uses ds scope. Namespace in the case of data source channels is a data source unique ID (UID) which is issued by Grafana at the moment of data source creation. The path is a custom string that plugin authors free to choose themselves (just make sure it consists of allowed symbols).

Refer to the tutorial about for more details.

The basic streaming example included in Grafana core streams frames with some generated data to a panel. To look at it create a new panel and point it to the -- Grafana -- data source. Next, choose and select the plugin/testdata/random-20Hz-stream channel.

A new API endpoint allows accepting metrics data in Influx format from Telegraf. These metrics are transformed into Grafana data frames and published to channels.

Refer to the tutorial about for more information.