Visualize Google Cloud BigQuery data in Grafana: the latest updates, key features, and more

Here at Grafana Labs, our commitment to our “big tent” philosophy runs deep. We prioritize interoperability and flexibility within our observability solutions, and believe you should be able to connect to and visualize data from a wide range of sources, including both open source and commercial technologies.

Our rich ecosystem of Grafana data sources directly reflects these values — and today, we’re excited to share a recent milestone related to that ecosystem.

Grafana Labs has successfully achieved the Google Cloud Ready – BigQuery designation for our Google Cloud BigQuery data source for Grafana. 

Google Cloud Ready - BigQuery is a partner integration validation program that intends to increase customer confidence in partner integrations with BigQuery. 

By earning this designation, we’ve proven that our data source has met a core set of functional and interoperability requirements when integrating Grafana with BigQuery. Being part of the program also means we’ll get more opportunities to collaborate closely with Google Cloud partner engineering and BigQuery teams to develop roadmaps.

In this post, we’ll provide a brief overview of our Google Cloud BigQuery data source for Grafana, highlight key features, and offer some helpful resources to get started.

The Google Cloud BigQuery data source for Grafana: overview and key features 

Our Google Cloud BigQuery data source allows you to query and visualize data from Google Cloud BigQuery — a fully managed, serverless, and AI-ready data platform hosted on Google Cloud — within Grafana.

Key features of the Google Cloud BigQuery data source for Grafana include:

• Query and visualization: Visualize Google Cloud BigQuery data directly within Grafana dashboards, supporting both time series and table visualizations. You can use macros to simplify syntax and make queries dynamic, such as filtering by time ranges.
• Flexible authentication: The data source supports authentication via Google Service Account keys (JWT), VM metadata server (when running on Google Cloud Compute Engine), and Workload Identity Federation (when running on Google Kubernetes Engine), making it adaptable to different deployment scenarios. 
• SQL query editor: Use a powerful SQL editor with rich autocompletion for BigQuery standard SQL, datasets, tables, columns, macros, and template variables. 
• Visual query editor: Don’t want to write SQL? No worries. The data source also includes a visual query editor with support for basic aggregations, filtering, grouping, ordering, and raw query previews.

In addition, the plugin integrates with the Google Cloud Resource Manager API, allowing you to access multiple Google Cloud projects from a single data source in Grafana. These and other features provide a robust solution for integrating BigQuery data into your Grafana observability workflows.

Learn more and next steps

To learn more about the Google Cloud BigQuery data source for Grafana, including how to install, configure, and provision the data source, please visit our plugin catalog page. 

You can also learn more about our broad ecosystem of data source plugins for Grafana in this blog post and by watching this webinar. 

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