Visualizing time series data from Couchbase with Grafana

Grafana is a quite popular tool for querying and visualizing time series data and metrics. If you follow my blog then you might have seen my earlier post about how to use Couchbase Server for managing time series data:




This blog is now about extending this idea by providing a Grafana Couchbase plug-in for visualizing purposes.

After you installed Grafana (I installed it on Ubuntu, but there are installation guides available here for several platforms), you are asked to configure a data source. Before we will use Grafana's 'SimpleJson' data source, it's relevant how the backend of such a data source looks like.


  • '/': Returns any successful response in order to test if the data source is available
  • '/search': Returns the available metrics. We will just return 'dax' in our example.
  • '/annotations': Returns an array of annotations. Such an annotation has a title, a time where it would occur, a text and a tag. We just return an empty array in our example. But you can easily see that it would be possible to create an annotation if a specific value is exceeded or a specific time is reached.
  • '/query': The request is containing a time range and a target metric. The result is an array which has an entry for every target metric and each of these entries has an array of data points. Each data point is a tuple of the metric value and the time stamp.

We will just extend our example from before with an Grafana endpoint and then point Grafana's generic JSON data source plug-in to it, but I can already see a project on the horizon which standardizes the time series management in Couchbase via a standard REST service which can then be used by a dedicated Grafana Couchbase plug-in.

First let's look at our backend implementation:




As usual, the full code can be found here: https://github.com/dmaier-couchbase/cb-ts-demo/blob/master/routes/grafana.js

Here how we implemented the backend:

  • '/': As you can see we just return a 'success:true' if the backend is accessible.
  • '/search': The only metric which our backend provides is the 'dax' one. 
  • '/annotations':  Only an example annotation is returned in this case. 
  • '/query': We just check if the requested metric is the 'dax' one. In this first example, we don't take the aggregation documents into account. Instead we just request the relevant data points by using a multi-get based on the time range. Because Grafana expects the datapoints in time order, we have to finally sort them by time. Again, this code will be extended in order to take the several aggregation levels into account (Year->Month->Day->Hour).


 Now back to Grafana! Let's assume that you successfully installed the 'SimpleJson' data source:


Then the only thing you need to do is to add a new data source to Grafana by pointing to our backend service (To run the backend service, just execute 'node app.js' after you checked out the full repository and installed all necessary dependencies.):


In this example I actually, just loaded a bit of random data for testing purposes by using the demo_data.js script.

Then all you have to do is to create a Dashboard an place a panel on it:



The rest should work more or less the same as with any other Grafana data source. :-)

Comments