Graphing Non Time Series SQL Data in Grafana

Video Lecture

Description

Grafana graphs Time Series data from many types of data sources extremely well. But sometimes you just want to graph, simple non time series data. i.e, Data without timestamps, flat tables that show simple statistics or values.

Example non time series data as a flat table.

id	name	value
1	Cat	56
2	Dog	5
3	Lizard	4
4	Crocodile	2
5	Koala	2
6	Cassowary	2
7	Peacock	1
8	Emu	1
9	Kangaroo	1

And you want to see this simple data, as graphs similar to below.

In an earlier video, we created the 'exampledb' schema on our mysql server that we installed locally on our Grafana server and setup as a datasource inside Grafana. Create MySQL Data Source

Lets now create a simple table with some data that we can query.

CREATE TABLE `exampledb`.`flat_table_example` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `username` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,
  `total` decimal(10,0) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=10 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Insert Statement

INSERT INTO `exampledb`.`flat_table_example`
(`username`,
`total`)
VALUES
('Cat',56),
('Dog',5),
('Lizard',4),
('Crocodile',2),
('Koala',2),
('Cassowary',2),
('Peacock',1),
('Emu',1),
('Kangaroo',1);

Check data exists

SELECT *
FROM `exampledb`.`flat_table_example`;

Explore the Data in Grafana

Open the Explore tab, select MySQL as the datasource and show SQL editor.

Replace the default sql with this below

SELECT
  username AS metric,
  total as value
FROM flat_table_example
ORDER BY id

Now convert it to a time series by adding NOW() as "time"

SELECT
  NOW() AS "time",
  username AS metric,
  total as value
FROM flat_table_example
ORDER BY id

And select to 'Format as' = 'Table' to see data.

See the video for the rest of the steps.