Data storytelling at HackUPC 2025: Celebrating 3 student hackathon projects powered by Grafana

Earlier this year, Grafana Labs was a proud sponsor of HackUPC — one of the biggest student hackathons in Europe — at BarcelonaTech. The event drew more than 700 passionate tech students from around the globe, all racing the clock in a 36-hour burst of creativity to build web, mobile, and hardware projects.

As a developer advocate here at Grafana Labs — where we are big believers in hackathons — it was a privilege to participate as mentor and judge in the HackUPC 2025 event. For our challenge, we focused primarily on the theme of sustainability, and asked a set of students to leverage Grafana to raise awareness of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Shout out to Niki Manoledaki, senior software engineer at Grafana Labs and a contributor to the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group (TAG ENV), for inspiring this sustainability-related challenge! 

The students in our group could approach the challenge in two ways: create compelling data visualizations using open data to reveal meaningful trends or develop an innovative Grafana app plugin to provide unique insights or functionalities related to their chosen SDG(s). 

It was so inspiring to see how the hackers used their creativity to tackle global issues and showcase the power of data. In this post, we recap and celebrate some of the Grafana hackathon projects that came out of the event.

Project Graf-Anna: tracking global climate and health trends 

The team behind Graf-Anna wanted to tell a data-driven story to illustrate the urgency of climate change, as outlined by the SDGs, and recognized Grafana as a powerful tool to help achieve this goal.

In particular, this team of hackers wanted to explore the connections between industrial development (SDG 9), responsible consumption (SDG 12), climate change action (SDG 13), and their effects on the planet and human health. The result was a comprehensive Grafana dashboard that visualizes the historical impact of the Industrial Revolution and human activity on CO2 emissions, climate trends, and health. It’s an excellent educational tool that uses both historical and live data to create a compelling narrative.

In the Grafana dashboard below, the team tracked trends in global emissions, temperature variation, natural disasters, CO2 per capita, and life expectancy.

They also tracked land usage, current world emissions per country, and CO2 emissions from deforestation.

Lastly, they built a conclusion panel to breakdown key takeaways from the data.

The team behind Graf-Anna had some pretty ambitious goals from the start. They initially wanted to build a custom Grafana app plugin with advanced features, including the integration of LLMs for insights. However, they hit some technical difficulties and ran into time constraints, which forced them to pivot their strategy. They decided to source, integrate, and visualize existing data to tell a clear story — which was still a big accomplishment on its own. 

Their project reinforced the power of Grafana data visualization as a storytelling tool, even without custom code. It’s a great example of learning and adapting on the fly, which hackathons are all about.

Peaceful Protest Tracker: insights for sustainable development

While Graf-Anna focused on global climate trends, another team used data to tackle a different real-world issue. The Peaceful Protest Tracker: Headlines vs. Reality project promoted peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development with accountable institutions, in line with SDG 16. The team wanted to apply their skills in web development, AI, and data visualization to a compelling and personal topic, inspired by the confusing and often contradictory news coverage following a tragic railway collapse in Serbia. 

Their solution was a dynamic Grafana dashboard that visualizes how protests unfolded in near-real-time, pulling data from various media outlets. The dashboard used a semi-live map to pinpoint protest locations.

It also included features like sentiment analysis and keyword usage comparisons to create a powerful example of storytelling with data.

This was a seriously ambitious project, and the team faced the major challenge of designing a complex system architecture connecting various technologies. They used Python for web scraping, the Gemini 2.5 Flash API for sentiment analysis, a Spring Boot backend, and MongoDB Atlas to store the data before visualizing it all in Grafana. 

The team learned how to work with Grafana from scratch, and should be incredibly proud of their persistence in bringing such a complex idea to life in 36 hours. It’s a fantastic example of using technology to address a critical real-world issue and what can be accomplished with a lot of determination (and probably a few too many potato chips!).

Project Musigrafs: visualizing global music trends  

We wrap our hackathon highlights with a project that was unrelated to the sustainability theme, but still showed a lot of creativity and told a powerful story through data. 

The Musigrafs project was inspired by the fast-paced nature of the music world and the difficulty of tracking emerging trends using existing apps like Spotify or YouTube Music. The team set out to build a data-driven web app that captures the “pulse of global music trends — live.” The result was a Grafana dashboard that visualizes top genres by country, common musical keys, and real-time audio features like energy and tempo for top hits. It’s an excellent tool for aspiring musicians to understand the market and kickstart their careers.

The team initially struggled to display the map in their desired format and had to explore other repositories for inspiration. To get the global information just right, they used GeoJSON, which helped them represent the countries’ borders. Connecting their GitHub custom GeoJSON to Grafana presented a hurdle, but the team managed to get the raw GeoJSON file contents with help from mentors and Grot AI. Ultimately, they were proud of the visual quality and clarity of their plots and successfully integrated real-time data, which was a core goal of their project.

Closing thoughts 

The Grafana support and judging team at HackUPC was so impressed by how quickly hackers grasped complex concepts, and we learned so much from their approaches and challenges. What made their projects successful was their fantastic storytelling and best practices in creating beautiful and impactful visualizations. And their great time management skills under pressure! We felt privileged to be there and connect with the next generation of tech talent and data storytellers. 

We want to thank the HackUPC volunteer organization, all the participating students, and all the fellow judges. Without your efforts, this would not have been possible. We can’t wait for HackUPC next year! 

In the meantime, you can find us at HackSheffield10 — another student hackathon event taking place at The University of Sheffield in November — where we’ll keep celebrating students’ passions and the power of data to make a difference.