Grafana Live feature overview

This topic explains the current Grafana Live capabilities.

Dashboard change notifications

As soon as there is a change to the dashboard layout, it is automatically reflected on other devices connected to Grafana Live.

Data streaming from plugins

With Grafana Live data source, plugins can stream data updates in the form of Grafana data frames to a frontend.

For data source plugin channels Grafana uses ds scope. Namespace in the case of data source channels is a data source unique ID (UID) which is issued by Grafana at the moment of data source creation. The path is a custom string that plugin authors free to choose themselves (just make sure it consists of allowed symbols).

For example, a data source channel looks like this: ds/<DATASOURCE_UID>/<CUSTOM_PATH>.

Refer to the tutorial about building a streaming data source backend plugin for more details.

The basic streaming example included in Grafana core streams frames with some generated data to a panel. To look at it create a new panel and point it to the -- Grafana -- data source. Next, choose Live Measurements and select the plugin/testdata/random-20Hz-stream channel.

Data streaming from Telegraf

A new API endpoint /api/live/push/:streamId allows accepting metrics data in Influx format from Telegraf. These metrics are transformed into Grafana data frames and published to channels.

Refer to the tutorial about streaming metrics from Telegraf to Grafana for more information.