Grafana community dashboards: Memorable use cases of 2024
Every year, we gather more evidence that there are countless ways to use Grafana. Need to monitor defects in steel alloys? Not a problem. Want to keep track of bird songs? It works for that, too. We love discovering the creative ways our community members around the world are using Grafana dashboards for both professional and personal reasons. Here is a look at some of the most useful, innovative, and surprising (monitoring kids’ chores!) projects we’ve seen in 2024.
Award winners
One of the highlights of GrafanaCON 2024 was the announcement of this year’s Golden Grot Awards finalists. The annual competition recognizes the top dashboards in two categories — personal and professional — and the grand prize winners won trips to Amsterdam to attend the conference.
Prepping for a morning commute
In the personal dashboard category, the winner was Ruben Fernandez, an SRE based in Atlanta who turned to Grafana Cloud and Prometheus for a very practical — and relatable — reason: preparing for his commute. “Traffic could go from maybe 25 minutes to an hour; it could change in that range. So I thought, what do I have to check every morning? How is the weather? How is the traffic? How long is my commute going to be?” he said.
By using APIs and GTFS real-time feeds to pull in data from weather.gov and the Metropolitan Atlanta Transit Authority, as well as drive-time and traffic information from Google Maps and Bing Maps, he can look at his dashboard and determine when to leave for his office and whether he should take his car, the train, or the bus. “Putting all the information in one spot, I can see what I have to do much easier.”
Identifying defects in steel alloys
In the professional dashboard category of this year’s Golden Grot Awards, the winner was Christopher Field, co-founder and president of Theia Scientific. He is in business with his brother, Kevin, a nuclear scientist. Christopher said they set out to “fundamentally change the workflow for scientists and engineers” who look at images to monitor the growth of defects in steel alloys caused by exposure to radiation for next-generation nuclear fission reactors and fusion energy.
They built software that helps researchers stream images from room-sized electron microscopes to a time series database and machine learning models that are used to instantly identify defects. With a Grafana dashboard, Christopher said, “they can do this analysis and decide if it’s a good material while it’s still running. Before, it could be a year and a half to two years before they could make that discovery.”
Home projects
Community members who use Grafana dashboards for work often get inspired to create ones they can use to monitor things — and people — at home. This year, some of the inventive projects we’ve covered include one that allows YouTube fans to see when their favorite creators post new content and one that helps travelers track currency exchange rates. Speaking of traveling, we also highlighted a dashboard that was designed to monitor a home VPN from anywhere with Grafana Cloud.
Parenting via dashboard
Yes, Grafana-powered parenting is now a thing — at least for Grafana Labs Senior Solutions Engineer and father of two Brian LeBlanc (who last year shared his dashboard for monitoring the water level in his swimming pool). His goal was to use Grafana Cloud to track whether his sons have cleaned their rooms and automatically notify them if they failed to do so.
In a blog post, LeBlanc broke down his so-called Roboparenting solution. It involves Slack messages with dynamic elements that call a custom endpoint written in Python, a MySQL database, a custom exporter for Prometheus in Python, Grafana Cloud, and Grafana IRM — which includes Grafana OnCall and Grafana Incident. Most importantly, it also requires the active participation of his kids (who are into it). Now, LeBlanc has a dashboard where he can quickly visualize the current room status, required room status, and room compliance status.
“We’re in the early stages of adoption and are still working out the best method and timing for alerting to ensure everyone responds each morning,” he wrote in April. “Who knows — I may even impose performance penalties or bonuses once we reach a mutually acceptable service-level agreement 😉.”
Visualizing smart home devices in one place
Before Principal Solutions Engineer Navish Bahl even worked at Grafana Labs, he had seen how it was possible to visualize an entire home automation setup in Grafana dashboards. Once he became a Granfanista, he set out to do it himself. “I went from zero to mid-level proficiency in home automation with corresponding Grafana dashboards,” he wrote. His project relied on Grafana Cloud, Home Assistant (a free and open source software for home automation), a Raspberry Pi, Wi-Fi router, some smart plugs and smart switches, an Ecobee thermostat, a Ring security system, an HP printer, and a MacBook.
In a blog post that serves as a beginner’s guide for anyone who wants to get started with home automation, he ran through the entire setup process, including how to direct the Home Assistant server to create Prometheus metrics for the data it has access to via integrations, and how to set up Grafana Alerting so you can learn about problems in your systems moments after they occur. In the end, Bahl was able to observe his living room temperature, humidity levels, occupancy and HVAC fan status, and his home security system all in one place.
Identifying bird songs
Ever wonder what kind of birds are chirping outside your window? So did Grafana Labs’ Senior Software Engineer Ivana Huckova and Staff Software Engineer Sven Großmann, who channeled their curiosity into creating an observability system for bird songs — aka obirdability. In a blog post, they walked through how to use an inexpensive microphone, a Raspberry Pi 4, plus open source tools like BirdNET (an AI-powered bird sound recognition framework), Prometheus, Grafana Loki, and Grafana to monitor and analyze tweets and chirps. They also set up alerts so they would know when a favorite species was detected.
The pair had a hoot working on their project, which they discussed in a GrafanaCON 2024 talk. Fellow bird fans can easily copy their work by using the two dashboard templates they created — including the one below.
Around the world—and beyond
Grafana dashboards can be translated into multiple languages, but no matter the language you speak, everyone can appreciate the beauty of bar charts, heatmaps, geomaps, or histograms in a dashboard.
One of the global users we highlighted on the blog this year was United Manufacturing Hub, a German startup that chose Grafana to power its IIoT platform. Meanwhile, customer talks at GrafanaCon 2024 included ones from the Zurich-based food tech company Planted, which utilizes Grafana as the single pane of glass for all production data; the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates on the Franco-Swiss border and monitors the world’s largest computing grid with Grafana and Mimir; and The National Library of the Netherlands, which implemented Grafana for visualization, Mimir for metrics, and Loki for logs to help gain valuable insights into its digital landscape.
Monitoring a lunar landing in real time (Japan)
On Jan. 19, 2024, Japan became the fifth country to put a spacecraft on the moon. Researchers and engineers from the country’s space agency, JAXA, monitored the operation in real time using Grafana dashboards that tracked its SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) spacecraft’s subsystems (e.g., power and navigation) as well as individual ones for three main phases: launch, running, and cruise. One of JAXA’s key goals was for SLIM to make for the world’s first pinpoint lunar landing and touch down within 100 meters of its intended target. Among the agency’s innovative dashboards was the one below, which features a panel on the right side that allowed JAXA’s team in the control room to observe SLIM approaching and landing on the moon’s surface.
Satoshi Nakahira, an associate senior researcher at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), shared details about the agency’s observability system and lunar landing dashboards in a GrafanaCON 2024 presentation. Grafana, he acknowledged, “played an important role in our operation.”
Helping manufacturers visualize sensor data (Denmark)
Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is a protocol used for communicating sensor data within vehicles and machinery, including trucks, cars, ships, and robots. The Danish company CSS Electronics builds professional-grade and simple-to-use CAN bus data loggers for end users that include engineers at automotive and industrial manufacturers (OEMs) who need to monitor assets in the field for R&D, diagnostics, or predictive maintenance. “A large share of our users also visualize their data via Grafana dashboards,” said CSS Electronics co-owner and head of sales and marketing Martin Falch.
In a blog post, Falch highlighted why the Amazon Athena data source for Grafana is a cost-effective and fast way for their users to visualize and analyze their CAN bus data. He also shared his company’s public Grafana-Athena dashboard playground, where anyone can see what it’s all about.
Empowering internal users with information (Germany)
When the team at Schwarz IT — the internal IT service provider for German-based multinational retailer the Schwarz Group — wants to deliver information to its internal customers (both technical and non-technical employees), their go-to tool is Grafana. One reason it’s so useful? The flexibility. “Because you can use Grafana in so many different ways, we are using it as a visualization layer for everything,” Felix Spitzer, Monitoring Specialist at Schwarz IT, said in an interview.
Today, Grafana Enterprise is used by more than 100 organizations within Schwarz IT. They have more than 6,000 dashboards and close to 1,500 active users. Use cases vary between countries depending on what needs to be monitored at different retail stores. The website teams, for example, use Grafana for an overview of JavaScript errors, while another team uses Grafana to track orders and check the resources and warehouses for Lidl food retailers. There is also a Grafana dashboard that provides an overview of IoT devices, inventory, and the uninterrupted power supply (UPS) for Kaufland stores in Germany (below).
In the wild
Although we regularly hear from customers and other community members who want to share their Grafana dashboards in conference presentations or on our blog, sometimes we find out about users through mentions in other blogs, news stories, and social media posts. We know Hootsuite, Cloudflare, and other big tech brands are using Grafana, but here are three personal projects that caught our attention this year.
Climatic measurements in the Italian Alps
In July, the scientific journal Nature featured an article by a team of researchers who have been collecting high-resolution climatic data from measurement stations along an elevation gradient in the Italian Alps. The data — which has been collected for several years — can be accessed internally and by the public through the website for their IT25 LT(S)ER Matsch|Mazia monitoring network. Sensors collect metrics such as air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and wind gusts, and precipitation, which are transferred to a file server each hour and stored in a time series database. Grafana dashboards, the authors wrote, “allow the data to be quickly visualized through graphs and allow the trends in the data to be analysed, where several measurements can be correlated in a single panel.”
The website features links to more than 20 dashboards like this one:
Tracking a diabetic child’s health
Dutch tech executive Erich Radstake has a daughter with type 1 diabetes, and in a post on LinkedIn, he wrote about the “abysmal” usability of the monitoring and tracking software for her insulin pumps, which missed crucial hypoglycemic episodes during her sleep.
Radstake set out to create his own tool, which was made with Grafana plus “more efficient usage” of APIs. He wrote, “My dashboard consolidates all essential data into a single, accessible overview. Whether you’re on a smartphone, computer, tv or tablet, you can track the blood sugars, insulin doses, and overall health seamlessly. Admittedly, as just a tech guy, my design skills may not match those of a UX expert, but it’s already leaps ahead of the official alternatives.”
Investigating the efficiency of an induction cooktop
In May, the energy efficiency-focused Australian website SwitchedOn featured a piece about one man’s attempt to answer the question: “How much power and energy does an induction cooktop use to cook chorizo and eggplant pasta?” In the story, Tim Eden, an EV and renewable energy enthusiast, wrote about his switch from a gas cooktop to an induction one. “I wanted a better understanding of how much power and energy the induction cooktop uses to make an evening meal because it will help me gauge my power and energy consumption in the future when I install a home battery,” he said.
He used an Enphase solar system equipped with consumption monitoring, and software he had written himself to collect data and store it using Prometheus and Grafana. After cooking a “delicious” chorizo and eggplant pasta, he was able to use his dashboard to observe his home’s power and energy consumption during that time.
We look forward to all of the dashboard eye candy to come in 2025!
Want to share your Grafana story and dashboards with the community? Drop us a note at stories@grafana.com.
