Going with the flow: How one Golden Grot Awards winner monitors wastewater with Grafana

What do pumps, protozoa, and Python have in common? In the city of Morro Bay, California, they all come together in one innovative (and, now, award-winning) Grafana dashboard.

Grant Chase, operational technology specialist and winner of the 2025 Golden Grot Awards in the professional category, didn’t just build a dashboard — he built a data-driven command center for an entire wastewater treatment operation. And yes, it even includes video footage of microscopic creatures.

“The engineering team was floored that there was a platform that made data that accessible and that easy for them,” Grant said during an interview at GrafanaCON 2025 last month. “There’s something so gratifying about when an incident happens and the team goes, ‘Let’s go check Grafana and find out what happened.’ They view it as a true resource and as a true tool to help solve problems.”

Read on to learn more about Grant’s epic dashboard, and check out our interview with him in the video below.

How it started vs. how it’s flowing 

Before Grafana, Morro Bay’s wastewater treatment system was running on decades-old technology. When Grant first joined the team in 2019, one of the lead operators showed him a browser window used to track two key metrics: one related to treatment process control and another to efficiency. Grant immediately noticed the solution was static, low-resolution, and antiquated. 

“It turned out to just be a snapshot of a really bad graph,” he recalled.

That’s when the lightbulb went off. Grant quickly pulled together a custom solution using Python and a Modbus TCP industrial library to tap into the raw data from the treatment plant. He fed that data into InfluxDB, but needed a way to visualize it. 

“Grafana turned out to be the answer,” Grant explained. “We had our two metrics, and they were beautifully visualized in Grafana. That was our first exposure to Grafana, and it really changed our ability to have visualizations.”

That initial Grafana dashboard ended up laying the groundwork for something much bigger. When the city of Morro Bay decommissioned its aging wastewater treatment plant and brought a brand-new facility online, the expectation was that modern, built-in software would cover everything the team needed.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

“It quickly became apparent that the engineers were asking for data sets that were available in the database but not visualized anywhere, and they weren’t part of the scope of work for that particular contractor building the system,” Grant said. “So we needed to quickly pivot, and I already had in my tool bag something that I knew would work well, and that was Grafana.” 

From there, Grant spun up a Grafana instance for the new wastewater treatment plant and built out a dashboard for “every single process area with every single piece of data.” 

The winning dashboard: A ’navigational springboard’

Ultimately, Grant built a real-time, highly contextual dashboard that’s become the go-to resource for operators, engineers, and lab staff alike at the new treatment plant. At the heart of this award-winning dashboard is a homepage designed with purpose: a left-to-right visual journey of wastewater treatment, intended to be a “navigational springboard” for users.

“Each column represents a process area, and below that are navigational buttons that let you go deeper into that particular part of the system.”

The dashboard helps teams visualize data from hundreds of sensors, motors, analyzers, and off-site lift stations. It dynamically adjusts data resolution for second-by-second accuracy, integrates lab data for compliance monitoring, and even includes embedded video feeds of the microorganisms found in the basin.

“That really creates a complete, or more complete, data model for us,” Grant said. “We know what the process is, what the samples were like, and what microorganisms were observed at a given period of time.”

Closing thoughts: Big tents and ‘Aha’ moments

For Grant, the real power of Grafana lies not just in the dashboards, but in the platform’s open, community-driven approach. Grafana’s “Big Tent” philosophy, he said, enabled the kind of creative problem-solving that led to exactly what his team needed.

“As a developer, I’m constantly limited by software,” he said. “So having software that allows me to continue to innovate and to serve the needs of my team is the biggest ‘Aha’ moment, for sure.”