Golden Grot Awards ceremony

Raj Dutt (00:00): Hello again everyone. We having fun? Nice. Hope we’ve enjoyed the content so far. So now is a brief interlude for what is now the third annual Golden Grot Awards. And so we showed you guys some of the interesting dashboards that we found in the wild and the Golden Grot Awards are a way for us to recognize special dashboards that were really well put together and essentially give away a Golden Grot. I don’t think it’s actually made out of gold otherwise I would’ve heard from our CFO, but our Golden Grot winners get a Golden Grot award. They get flown out to GrafanaCON to be able to share their inspiration and their actual dashboards that they’ve built. And they also get a hearty handshake from me and an awkward photo, which I’m sure they’re really looking forward to. But no, in all seriousness, these are the best of the best in terms of dashboards that really make us go, wow. They are voted on by an esteemed panel and then we kind of bring that vote out to the public and have the entire community vote for the final Golden Grot winners. So for the first winner under the personal category, I’d like to invite Ruben out to the stage and Ruben is a repeat winner of the Golden Grot Award.

(01:23): Ruben actually won last year. That’s right, isn’t it Ruben? Yes. And in fact, as a result of this, we’re considering changing our rules for maybe no repeat winners. No, just kidding. But unbelievable dashboard and really excited to hear you talk about it. So take it away. Yep. All right, thanks.

Ruben Fernandez (01:41): Okay. Hello everybody. My name is Ruben Fernandez. I am a Principal Engineer at Dell Technologies. This is an honor to be here today talking about my dashboard and I would like to thank everybody who vote for it. Why I decide to create a dashboard about the Station? Well I’m passionate about the space. So I thought it was going to be great to create a dashboard with something that I really love. So the technology that I use is Grafana Cloud. I use a free account. I use multiple API calls using Python to get my data, my data sources, Infiniti data source also to do API calls. I also use the Prometheus Python client for instrumentation to get the metrics from the data that I was getting from the API calls. Grafana Alloy to send these metrics to the cloud. And then the panels that I use, most of them are out of the box panels, nothing crazy and some of them I am using the Business Variable plugin from Volkov Labs to make those panel looks nicer.

(03:05): And also the video plugin from Innius to display the videos from YouTube. I could divide my dashboard in two parts. The top one is about the tracking to the Station where I have a geomap panel and I’m running an API call to get the longitudinal and latitude for the station so I can display where it is at any moment, the station, and I’m refreshing that every five seconds. So that gives you the illusion that the station is moving around the globe. I’m also displaying the path that the station is following those red dots. Using the same metrics. I create another panel, the passing by panel I call it, and using the Infinity data source plugin I’m able to get with the location where the station is passing right now at that moment, like in the sample you can see on the right top it says it’s passing through by Canada and also using the same metrics I’m creating, this is a basic one, just a panel to tell me the station is passing by a day area or a night area.

(04:21): This is the cool part. Also, I knew that NASA had streaming videos from the station. So I decide to use one from a camera that was pointing down directly to Earth. And the moment that I saw the video plaing and the panels giving me the same information, all those four panels giving the same information, that was the moment that I realized that I was doing something cool because I spent hours just watching the video and reading the information that I was getting from the other panels and everything working synchronized and receiving the same information. That was pretty cool for me. Then I decide to add this widget from NASA that is called the Spot the Station that allows everybody to just introduce in where you are, your city, in your country, and some places your state, and you get when it’s going to be the next time that the station is going to pass by your location.

(05:24): And this is what the top part of the dashboard. And for a while it was my dashboard, but then I realized that the station is not just a piece of metal, it’s not just a satellite moving around. It has people inside all these astronauts that they have my same passion about the Space. They are risking their lives and they are working in projects that we’re going to use later and here down on earth. So I decide that they deserve a space on my panel, on my dashboard. So I create this panel with another API call that I’m getting a basic data from all the astronauts in the Space. And I also add a video for each one of them, a picture from internet and using the business variable plugin from Volkov Labs. I put all together in a nice way. And also I use the video plugin from Innius to display the video using variables.

(06:32): That way I can show different videos depending of the astronaut. So I did the same for the spacecraft, docked at the station, similar panel, same different information, similar panel. And I created another panel for the projects that they are working on. The astronauts at the station, these are links going to NASA webpage where they talk about 15 of the projects that they are working right now. And last ones, I call it telemetry data. These metrics, I already have them from the other API calls, so I decide that it was nice to have the attitude, the speed of this basic data. And this is how the lower part of my dashboard look. And now I have an animation that hopefully works where you can see everything working on the top part. The station is passing by Canada on the left you see it saying is passing by Canada, Columbia, British Columbia, and the video is passing through the mountains and also on the spot the station trying to search when going to be the next time that I can see the station spot, the station in Madrid, Spain.

(07:54): And now in the lower part you see I can move around searching for the astronaut that I want to see the video and the information. So it’s changing depending on the astronaut that you select. And the video is from YouTube’s telling you what they do and why they do whatever they do in the Space. And this one for the spacecraft, this is cool too. Those are all the spacecraft that the astronauts use to go to the station back and forth. And here is the launch of one of them. You can see it’s flying through the space going to the station and at the end you can see is docking into the station, which is pretty good to see. And those are the links that I told you before. And you see is giving information from the page on NASA. And that’s it. That’s my dashboard. Here you have the dashboard is still live. Here is the URL. And you can check on the QR code that you want to see and the user and password. And if you have any question, please send me an email or ask me. I’m going to be around during the convention. Thank you.

Raj Dutt (09:14): So amazing job Ruben, and congratulations for winning the third annual Golden Grot award.

Ruben Fernandez (09:20): Thank you so much

Raj Dutt (09:21): And hope to see you again next year.

Ruben Fernandez (09:22): I’ll be here.

Raj Dutt (09:23): Maybe. Yep. Alright, thank you. No worries. Thank you. Great. Okay, great. So for our next winner, our final winner for the professional category of the annual Golden Grot Awards, I’d like to introduce and bring up to stage Grant Chase, who’s built an amazing municipal water filtration and restoration dashboard. Grant, thanks so much. Take it away, sir.

Grant Chase (09:52): Sir,

(09:55): I’m a musician, a father and husband and a organic homesteader with a passion for open source, IoT industrial automation technologies. So imagine a application where your user base is an entire city population where your SLA is mandated by state and federal agencies and any downtime could have critical public health or environmental impacts. Well this is wastewater. The concept is simple return a clean product to the water cycle, but it’s not easy processing a million gallons of wastewater every day. This takes extensive automated systems referred to in industrial automation as SCADA. S SCADA is an industrial acronym for supervisory control and data acquisition. It’s a suite of hardware and software that combined give operations teams remote control, data visualization, data collection, as well as alarming capabilities.

(11:08): Now you might be asking at this point, if SCADA provides all of this, then why Grafana? Well, besides the obvious, the rapid development allows me to quickly meet the needs of multiple teams. And JSON quickly helps me with reduplicating any styles create a cohesive environment across the instance, and I can combine multiple data sources, of course the Big Tent, so it prevents data siloing in our organization. On the user side, intuitive navigation makes training very simple for the crew and adoption quick. And it became and is a staple in our organization. It’s the single source of truth and it’s more than just the single pane of glass. It is the central point of all data for the organization. And then there’s segmentation. So by separating the historical from the actual live process, we free up critical resources for the control side. And we also separate the data historically on another layer, enhancing security and making it easy to make this data available to organizations outside. Contractors and engineers often need our data to review the process. So let’s get into a live demo and I’ll show you what it’s all about.

(12:31): All right, so this is the landing page for all of the operators. The flow is wastewater. Left to right here we see the influent pump stations that feed the wastewater treatment plant. This is a seven day total of the influent. Now we do a little less than a million gallons every day for some perspective, the city of Seattle does over a hundred million gallons every day. So when you flush the toilet, you’re contributing to this. Over here we have the heart of the facility, which is the treatment process. Our treatment process is biological, meaning that we create a environment that is conducive to certain aerobic bacteria that break down organics in the wastewater. After this column, it moves to the out – the effluent as it’s referred. It can either be the tertiary process, which is recycled water or the ocean outfall, and then it goes out to the fishes. This is the seven day total of the out. And we have chemical levels for all of the chemicals we have on site, as well as an embedded Iframe of the last five videos that were taken from the microscope. If the microscope is live, then the stream will be live. It fails over after five seconds to the prerecorded videos. Underneath each process area is a breakdown of more intense and in depth information for each process. So if I scroll down here, I’m going to enter, not that one, but that one’s cool.

(14:14): Okay, so here is two of our main pump stations over the last six hours, a shared tool tip kind of bonds the times together. Here we’re using mapping to take the pump states of one and zero to a more operator friendly on and off. These little nuances really help your end user know what they’re looking at. And of course, Grafana makes it pretty easy to make it look pretty. We collect metrics in a very dense fashion. So by the second, and if a occurrence happens and I really need to drill down, I can increase the resolution of that particular graph and it’s going to pull in a little more detail. So I’m going to head back to the home screen. Now. We’re going to go where our bug friends live and we’re going to look at the aeration level in the tank currently. So here we can see from the flow top down numbers of sensors and flows that contribute to that basin.

(15:17): Now this area alone, we collect over 200 metrics from pumps, sensors, motor speeds, airflow. This using thresholds we want to be in that green zone maintaining a certain parts per million of oxygen in the basin for the right bacteria. And this shows that we’re on track below, you can see the valve position. So the valves are swinging wider with demand, but maintaining a constant dissolved oxygen. And so we use this a lot if we have problems with our aeration. So the final thing here, I’m going to go back to the home screen. We’re going to pull up our microscope videos. So this interface is custom built to allow our operators to quantify what microorganisms are observed at different periods of time. So below we have a thumbnail time series representation of each of these videos. I can go one click in and now I have that video live if I want to expand my time range and look at videos over the past six months.

(16:29): Then now my thumbnail is a lot longer here. We can see this one’s been tagged as a favorite, hence the little star. This is a great one. Actually, this one’s even better because he actually eats it. This is a rotifer trying to suck in this piece of food. There it goes. So he’s hungry. Alright, so these are the guys who are responsible for returning clean water to us, which is pretty amazing. And all we do is create an environment for them to live. Now this interface isn’t just for fun. It also allows us to tag the microorganisms retroactively. After the video is taken, we can update the metadata. Let’s say that I didn’t really want this video to be a favorite. I can make it false. Push that to our backend program through an API. Update successful; star is gone from the favorites. I can also search by favorites using dashboard variables.

(17:26): I can just bring in the favorites from the last six months, maybe drill down to a certain microorganism, a water mite, also known as hydrocarnia. Here’s our friend right there. Pretty icky looking dude. Now these microorganisms are indicative to the age of the wastewater in that particular basin. So this is not one we normally want to see. We’ve only it once, but it helps us quantify with the timestamp when that was observed. So in closing, what you’re seeing here is the possibilities of that big tent concept where if you can think it, you could probably build it with Grafana. A big shout out to Volkov Labs because these plugins and what you’re seeing here is what makes that possible. So remember that if you can think it, you can probably do it with Grafana. So thank you very much.

Raj Dutt (18:30): Cool. That’s really amazing stuff, Grant. Not what we typically see in some of our IT dashboards. You give new meaning to things like flow and syncs and payloads and

Raj Dutt (18:42): maybe even logs. No, just kidding. But in all seriousness, that was an amazing view of what you’re up to at the municipal treatment plant. Thanks so much and congratulations, your Golden Grot.

Grant Chase (18:52): Thank you, Raj.