[HN Gopher] How to monitor your local weather with Grafana
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       How to monitor your local weather with Grafana
        
       Author : meysamazad
       Score  : 145 points
       Date   : 2024-12-31 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (grafana.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (grafana.com)
        
       | arccy wrote:
       | this is just marketing spam for: install this plugin.
        
         | leeoniya wrote:
         | the Infinity plugin is pretty awesome, free, and oss; i'm not
         | sure this qualifies as spam, per se. nothing there requires
         | signing up for cloud/SaaS, and you can 100% run this locally.
         | 
         | i mean, you can always roll your own UI if that's something you
         | prefer / can do. (grafana uses uPlot [0] if you need to render
         | millions of points).
         | 
         | disclaimer: i work on dataviz at grafana
         | 
         | [0] https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot
        
           | diggan wrote:
           | I'm guessing that because the article/blogpost only talks
           | about Grafana Cloud and doesn't even mention that there are
           | other ways of running it, it ends up reading kind of like
           | marketing post rather than just instructions/engineering
           | post.
        
             | leeoniya wrote:
             | > it ends up reading kind of like marketing post
             | 
             | well, that's not untrue either :)
        
         | breakingcups wrote:
         | Yeah, it also has high "draw the rest of the owl" levels. It
         | just tells you how to import someone else's dashboard as
         | opposed to telling you how one might configure that from
         | scratch.
         | 
         | All the steps that promise slightly more details just mention
         | "Coming Soon" [0]
         | 
         | [0]: https://github.com/scarolan/grafana-cloud-
         | tutorial/blob/main...
        
       | bovermyer wrote:
       | This article's primary usefulness is in reminding me that there
       | are some great public APIs out there that I could use to feed
       | into a personal dashboard in Grafana.
        
       | kubb wrote:
       | To be honest, building a JSON feed consumer with a web frontend
       | is a weekend project nowadays.
       | 
       | Hosting it costs money and requires more work but... deploying a
       | simple app is something that you should have in your skillset
       | anyway.
       | 
       | With a cloudflare tunnel, you can run it on a Mac Mini at home.
        
       | hlesesne wrote:
       | I did this a few years ago (sans plugin) and correlated weather
       | to velocity and WIP (Jira) for our development team. I was
       | disappointed to find no meaningful correlation.
        
         | archerx wrote:
         | Years ago I worked on a live TV show that allowed viewers to
         | call and ask questions to hosts. It was a small local TV
         | station but the show was some what popular. We wanted to know
         | what variables affected how many calls there are per show and
         | we manually tracked a bunch of data points and one of them was
         | the weather. Once enough data was collected it was very clear
         | for our show the weather had a big impact, when we had
         | beautiful weather we had less calls but when the weather was
         | horrible we had a lot more calls. In hindsight it was obvious
         | that when it rains people will stay home and watch TV.
         | 
         | Another fun thing this data collecting showed me was subjective
         | bias of certain managers. One of them was sure that a certain
         | hosts were getting much less calls than the others during the
         | show but the data showed that besides one "star" all the hosts
         | have about the same amount of calls even though it "felt" like
         | they got less.
        
           | cyberpunk wrote:
           | Not to "captain obvious" your efforts but did you really need
           | to prove this?
        
           | paxys wrote:
           | Or maybe your show was affecting the weather
        
       | tengbretson wrote:
       | You can take this a step further and get one of those 5-in-
       | one/7-in-one weather stations and then listen to its
       | communications to its basestation with an RTL-SDR using rlt_433
       | and then pipe those datapoints into a Prometheus + Grafana
       | installation.
       | 
       | https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
        
         | joelkoen wrote:
         | If you're lucky a neighbour may already have a compatible
         | weather station nearby, which you can freely collect data from
         | as long as you're in range ;)
        
         | diggan wrote:
         | I ended up buying a bunch of temperature/humidity/pm2.5 sensors
         | that communicate over Zigbee, then collect the data with
         | Zigbee2MQTT, which was trivial with the mqtt_consumer in
         | Telegraf.
         | 
         | The benefit (or drawback I guess) with your approach is that
         | you can also ingest your neighbors data, if you can reach it :)
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | I'm gonna stay that's a little more than "a step further"
        
         | jcrawfordor wrote:
         | Davis Instruments is on the pricey end but their WeatherLink
         | Live gateway has a simple local JSON API. For years I scraped
         | it with Prometheus for use in Grafana but I have since switched
         | to HomeAssistant for the analytics/visualization just for
         | simplicity.
        
       | kaffekaka wrote:
       | I monitor my local weather using a windows based system.
        
         | AnonymousPlanet wrote:
         | I use a combination of windows and doors. People say they help
         | with requirements somehow, however I believe they're most
         | suitable for verification of the monitored state.
        
           | zikduruqe wrote:
           | I use a rock hanging from a string.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_rock
        
             | WarOnPrivacy wrote:
             | I use a FL calendar. Mar-Oct: sucks. Nov-Feb: sucks less.
        
               | brewtide wrote:
               | Sounds like the FL calendar is about 100% inverted from
               | the ME calendar. :)
        
             | diggan wrote:
             | > I use a rock hanging from a string.
             | 
             | And where is this rock hanging and how to you observe it?
             | 
             | We all try to escape the claws of Doors & Windows Inc, but
             | whatever you do, when you interact with The Outside,
             | they're required...
        
         | tejtm wrote:
         | it is a pane to set up
        
       | nullify88 wrote:
       | Very happy to see Grafana adopt this plugin to continue it's
       | development among all the various other data sources grafana can
       | plugin in to. I'm happy to bring Grafana and it's stack to the
       | work place and developers are very happy using it with their
       | OpenTelemetry integrations. Their only complaint is that some of
       | the settings for panels can be difficult to find.
       | 
       | My own wish is that I hope something like this
       | https://github.com/knightss27/grafana-network-weathermap is
       | adopted too. I know it maybe possible using Canvas but Canvas is
       | too much of a blank slate and needs a lot of work to set it up
       | the same way.
        
         | leeoniya wrote:
         | > Very happy to see Grafana adopt this plugin
         | 
         | we adopted the author along with it :)
         | 
         | > My own wish is that I hope something like this
         | https://github.com/knightss27/grafana-network-weathermap is
         | adopted too. I know it maybe possible using Canvas but Canvas
         | is too much of a blank slate and needs a lot of work to set it
         | up the same way.
         | 
         | good feedback. it's been discussed on and off, and we'll def
         | improve Canvas in the future, but the viz team is fairly small
         | so we have to manage how much stuff we take on to maintain
         | forever.
        
         | hackernewds wrote:
         | I really hope grafana adopts a code-based back end so I'm not
         | having to fiddle around with settings in the UI, which are very
         | very very very terrible
        
           | nullify88 wrote:
           | Perhaps you can have a go with jsonnet.
           | https://github.com/grafana/grafonnet it's not perfect but I
           | believe there's some progress towards dashboards as code.
        
           | leeoniya wrote:
           | it's coming, and high prio. stay tuned for "as code" updates
           | in the next 6mo.
           | 
           | making this experience good (e.g. composable dashboards)
           | required some fundamental schema changes that were difficult
           | to do until recently.
           | 
           | a lot of this re-schematization is happening as "v2" work,
           | e.g. https://github.com/grafana/grafana/pull/98408
        
       | bix6 wrote:
       | Is there a list of projects that have used (or expanded) upon
       | this? Curious to see how far people have taken this.
        
       | steve_wilson wrote:
       | I'm ingesting data from my local weather service into Prometheus
       | and display it in grafana, and what I find most interesting is
       | how the forecast for a certain day changes over time, e.g. seeing
       | how many changes happen until the service lands on the actual
       | precipitation probability for the next hour, as well as
       | correlations between changes across days - something most APIs
       | don't provide by default but once you feed them into Prometheus
       | you get the historic changes easily.
        
       | TheLegace wrote:
       | Today was the first day I ever used Grafana and what a terrible
       | day its been. Grafana really needs to simplify their interface.
       | There is no point having so many features when you can't even use
       | the most basic functionality without pulling your hair out.
       | 
       | If there is going to be an editable JSON panel at least separate
       | out the presentation and data layers. I don't even know where to
       | start with the query editor, NewRelic allows autocomplete using
       | the text editor so instead of clicking it will use context to
       | figure out what to show. If it weren't were all the available
       | dashboards and pretty looking things I would just use chronograf.
        
       | xxr wrote:
       | "Grafana Cloud" sounds a little limiting in the context of a
       | weather app, no?
        
       | ulrischa wrote:
       | I have build a grafana weather dashboard with the data from an
       | enviro+ some years ago. It monitors a lot of weather data from my
       | home. You can see it here in German: https://umwelt-olching.de
        
       | nodesocket wrote:
       | Is there a good simple Docker containerized weather app? I want
       | to run it locally and Grafana Cloud plus a bunch of required
       | plugins is way to heavy.
        
       | Johnny555 wrote:
       | Coincidentally, I was just looking for an easy way to visualize
       | temperature data from my thermostat and outdoor sensors, and
       | found an InfluxDB logger plugin for Hubitat. It only took a few
       | clicks to get it to send all of my switch and sensor data to
       | InfluxDB. Now I just need to finish creating some dashboards and
       | alerts.
       | 
       | https://hubitat.com/
       | 
       | https://community.hubitat.com/t/using-he-with-with-influxdb-...
        
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       (page generated 2024-12-31 23:00 UTC)