Hey everyone,
Very excited to have my IotaWatt installed and to see all this great data! I’m really interested in learning more about building dashboards in Grafana, and I understand that most who are doing this are also using Influx DB.
Here’s the thing. I don’t have any experience with coding, Raspberry Pi, Influx DB or Grafana. I have no idea where to start. Here are my questions:
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I want beautiful and rich data visualizations on Grafana, what do I need Influx DB for?
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What resources would you recommend for an absolute beginner? My goal is to get data from IotaWatt to Grafana, what do I need to do? What resources (forum posts, videos, tutorials, etc.) would you recommend?
Thanks in advanced, excited to learn more and get the most out of this tool.
-Caza
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IotaWatt’s job is to capture the data*
InfluxDb is to store the data (at high granularity). It can also run background/continuous queries.
Grafana draws the pretty dashboards by querying the data stored in influxdb
*Iotawatt is pretty good at graphing data while investigating issues but that isn’t its main job.
If you haven’t got a pi already don’t hold you breath - there is a global supply shortage which won’t be fixed for months yet (limited quantities that are produced sell out within minutes) however influxdb can run on any ‘always on’ machine (or in the cloud) while Grafana runs on most types of OS but only needs to run when you want to look at the dashboards.
My system is still running version 1 of influxdb if I were starting now I would use version 2 from scratch (though it might need the 64 bit version of the pi OS) which would introduce some complications for a beginner.
If you have a stable internet connection then a cloud instance of influx might be the best way to start with grafana on your local machine.
In terms of Tutorials, I think I just searched iotawatt influxdb grafana and found some version1 influx how tos.
Good luck.
Edit: clarified that grafana pulls it’s data from influxdb
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