grafanimate

Animate timeseries data with Grafana.

About

grafanimate captures screenshots while animating a Grafana dashboard by manipulating its time range control, i.e. navigating through time. The result can be rendered as a sequence of png images, an animated gif file, and as a video file.

Attention!

This program can put significant load on your Grafana instance and the underlying database machinery. Handle with care!

Setup

Prerequisites

This program uses the fine FFmpeg program for doing the heavy lifting within in its postprocessing subsystem.

grafanimate

pip install grafanimate

Note

We absolutely recommend installing this program into a Python virtualenv:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install grafanimate

Usage

Introduction

grafanimate works by operating on animations defined within description files, written in Python. In cinematography jargon, this is called "exposure sheet", or "dope sheet".

An exposure sheet (also known variously as "dope sheet", "camera instruction sheet", or "X-sheet") is a sheet of paper used primarily in traditional animation to mark out the timing of various actions and dialogue.

grafanimate offers convenient data types, AnimationScenario and AnimationSequence, for outlining an animation scenario made of multiple sequences.

Please have a look at the scenarios.py file for a full example containing multiple scenarios.

Synopsis

A scenario definition:

AnimationScenario(
    grafana_url="https://play.grafana.org/",
    dashboard_uid="000000012",
    sequences=[
        AnimationSequence(
            start="2021-11-15T02:12:05Z",
            stop="2021-11-15T02:37:36Z",
            every="5min",
            mode=SequencingMode.CUMULATIVE,
        ),
    ],
)

In order to run a built-in scenario, invoke:

grafanimate --scenario=playdemo --output=./animations

Details

grafanimate also supports relative timestamps, based on the fine pytimeparse2 library.

• Within every, you will express a duration.

Help

For getting a detailed and descriptive overview about all available command line options, please invoke:

grafanimate --help

Examples

Examples for scenario mode. Script your animations in file scenarios.py or any other Python module or file.

# Use freely accessible `play.grafana.org` for demo purposes.
grafanimate --scenario=playdemo --output=./animations

# Example for generating Luftdaten.info graph & map.
export GRAFANIMATE_OUTPUT=./animations
grafanimate --grafana-url=http://localhost:3000/ --dashboard-uid=1aOmc1sik --scenario=ldi_all

# Use more parameters to control the rendering process.
grafanimate --grafana-url=http://localhost:3000/ --dashboard-uid=acUXbj_mz --scenario=ir_sensor_svg_pixmap \
    --header-layout=studio --datetime-format=human-time --panel-id=6

Gallery

Composition: The Hiveeyes Project. Developing a flexible beehive monitoring infrastructure. Clicking on an image will take you to the animated version.

luftdaten.info coverage

Coverage of luftdaten.info sensors starting October 2015 across Europe.

• Data source: luftdaten.info (LDI)
• Production: Luftdatenpumpe, LDI data plane v2, daily.
• Development: Erneuerung der Luftdatenpumpe. All contributions welcome.

Fine dust pollution on New Year's Eve

Animation of fine dust pollution on New Year's Eve 2018 across Europe.

• Data source: luftdaten.info (LDI)
• Production: Luftdatenpumpe, LDI data plane v2, historical.
• Development: Erneuerung der Luftdatenpumpe. All contributions welcome.

DWD CDC

Short weather film about temperature, sun and precipitation based on DWD/CDC data in March 2018.

• Data source: DWD Open Data (DWD)
• Production: DWD Climate Data Center (CDC), 10m-Werte: Aktuelle Lufttemperaturen, Sonnenscheindauer & Niederschlag
• Development: <work in progress>

IR-Sensor SVG-Pixmap

IR-Sensor SVG-Pixmap displaying temperature changes inside a beehive.

• Data source: Clemens Gruber (CG)
• Development: How to Visualize 2-Dimensional Temperature Data in Grafana

Background and details

Introduction

Animating things in Grafana across the time-axis in the spirit of the GeoLoop Panel Plugin hasn't been unlocked for Grafana in a more general way yet. Challenge accepted!

Time warp

At this programs' core is the code to set time range in Grafana:

timeSrv = angular.element('grafana-app').injector().get('timeSrv');
timeSrv.setTime({from: "2015-10-01", to: "2018-12-31"});

Rendering engine

Turtles all the way up, the main rendering work horse is a Firefox Browser automated through Marionette Python Client fame:

The Marionette Python client library allows you to remotely control a Gecko-based browser or device which is running a Marionette server.

Outlook

Neither Playlists nor Scripted Dashboards (now deprecated) offer these things to the user, but this program can be combined with both in order to implement more complex animations on top of Grafana.

---

Development

# Acquire sources.
git clone https://github.com/panodata/grafanimate
cd grafanimate

# Create and activate virtualenv.
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install package in "editable" mode.
pip install --editable=.

# Run tests.
make test

Project information

The code lives on GitHub and the Python package is published to PyPI.

Contributing

We are always happy to receive code contributions, ideas, suggestions and problem reports from the community. Spend some time taking a look around, locate a bug, design issue or spelling mistake and then send us a pull request or create an issue. You can also discuss grafanimate on our forum, you are welcome to join.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the contributors who helped to co-create and conceive this program in one way or another. You know who you are.

Also thanks to all the people working on Python, Grafana, Firefox, FFmpeg, and the countless other software components this program is based upon.

License

grafanimate is licensed under the terms of the GNU AGPL v3 license.