Hungry for data: Monitoring carnivorous plants with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki
Thursday, May 8
3:20 PM
10 mins
Main Stage
About this session
What do observability and carnivorous plants have in common? As it turns out, quite a lot when you’re obsessed with keeping your Nepenthes and Venus Flytraps thriving in Scotland (5,900 miles away from their ancestral home)! In this lightning talk, Jay Clifford, a developer advocate at Grafana Labs, shares his journey of applying observability practices to maintain a small carnivorous plant tank, turning his love for these fascinating plants into a data-driven passion project.
Jay will share how he monitors key metrics (temperature, humidity, and water levels) using Prometheus to maintain the optimal environment for the four ravenous plants. He will then show how he transforms snapshots of the tank into logs to be consumed by Loki using the multimodel features of an LLM and uses Grafana to visualize these conditions, set up alerts, and trigger automated actions like activating the watering system and humidifier. Think of it as SRE for a tiny, toothy jungle.
