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About this session
What do observability and carnivorous plants have in common? As it turns out, quite a lot when you’re obsessed with keeping your Nepenthes and Venus Flytraps thriving in Scotland (5,900 miles away from their ancestral home)! In this lightning talk, Jay Clifford, a developer advocate at Grafana Labs, shares his journey of applying observability practices to maintain a small carnivorous plant tank, turning his love for these fascinating plants into a data-driven passion project.
Jay will share how he monitors key metrics (temperature, humidity, and water levels) using Prometheus to maintain the optimal environment for the four ravenous plants. He will then show how he transforms snapshots of the tank into logs to be consumed by Loki using the multimodel features of an LLM and uses Grafana to visualize these conditions, set up alerts, and trigger automated actions like activating the watering system and humidifier. Think of it as SRE for a tiny, toothy jungle.
Speakers
Speaker 1 (00:02): So I promise you I will not sing for long. We’ll see how we go. Little Shop of Horrors. No. So today I’m talking to you about carnivorous plants. This has been a passion project for about three years. I’m super excited to tell you about it. My partner is more excited because I finally have someone else to talk to apart from them about it. So a little bit about me. Oh, I’ll skip that one. There we have me. By day I work for Grafana doing all things Loki. I mean your community. Be nice to me. And then by night I’m a big gamer Lego enthusiast and IoT enthusiast. But there’s one hobby I’m missing on this and that is the carnivorous plants. And this is where I lose people at parties, they normally go running.
(00:59): So what are carnivorous plants? Hands up. How many people know what a carnivorous plant is? Okay, cool way. There we go. So carnivorous plants, if you don’t know, gain their nutrients, not their energy. Then nutrients through ingesting live prey like ants and other invertebrae and so forth. There are actually 12 families of carnivorous plants, but I’m only going to talk about free today, the ones I raise myself. So the most famous one Dionaea muscipula is your Venus flytrap. And a fun fact you didn’t know about them is they actually count to two. So you have to trigger two hairs in a trap, let’s say a fly triggers two hairs and within 30 seconds, and that closes the trap that saves that plant’s energy. Sarracenia a trumpet pitcher plant that’s located in the US. And then my personal favorite is the Nepenthes, the tropical pitcher plant.
(01:58): A fun fact here, and I’m growing one, I’ve only got a juvenile at the moment, is some genus of Nepenthes can hold up to one liter of water, one liter of digestive juices is what I should say. And they can eat rats, which is pretty crazy. So what we’re here to do today though is talk about location. So Venus flytraps and Sarracenia are actually located here in the US and you can see they need a lot of light, a large amount of temperature, and their humidity has to be quite high. Nepenthes even more so 25 degrees over 70 to 90% humidity, which is wild. And then there’s me in Scotland where this is probably on a good day. We get 2000 to 10,000 lux of sunlight. It’s about five to 12 degrees. That’s our summer. And the humidity is pretty good, but when you’re trying to grow them inside, it’s not great.
(03:00): So bit of a timeline for you. I did try to grow these as kids and I think we all did, right? You’ve put them next to a window seal and then about a month they’re dead and then you cry and then your mom and dad throw them away and you never think about them again. Well, me as an adult, I said, no, it has to be better. I have to do better. And so I said, I am going to regulate the temperature of these plants. I’m going to regulate the humidity. I want to see these things blossom in Scotland. And so on the left hand side you can see what they look like as juveniles and then cut to a year later, they are slow growing plants. You can see they actually grew quite considerably inside in the small little fish tank that I had them in.
(03:45): The problem though was I was actually a victim of my own success. They actually grew out of the tank and they became a problem. They needed actually more humidity. The grow light I was using was drying the plants out. So I kind of had this problem here where when you look at Nepenthes, their pictures are meant to last from one month to six months depending on the genus. But mine were lasting maybe two weeks to three weeks, which was such a shame. And you can see all the crisping of lids and stuff here. So as an IoT and automation enthusiast, I’ve thought I needed to save the day here. And here’s my crazy architecture. I have three Raspberry Pis running for this. Now I have a Raspberry Pi dedicated to sensor reading. So I have using the I2C board here, I have a waterproof humidity and temperature sensor that regulates mostly for me the humidity in the tank that I need.
(04:40): And then I have a camera tethered to the same Raspberry Pi. More on that in a moment. That’s where Loki comes into this. All of that data or that telemetry is actually instrumented with OpenTelemetry because I wanted to know about OpenTelemetry and I thought why not put sensor data into OpenTelemetry format and send that to our platform, which has been interesting. Then I have Alloy sitting there collecting those metrics, batching them, and then I send them to Loki and Prometheus and Grafana all on the same Raspberry Pi. The cool thing for me though on Grafana is that I actually have an alert that triggers and this points to node red. And so if the humidity drops below a certain level, you will trigger the humidifier automatically so I can keep the humidity at the regulated level, which I’ve set at is 80%.
(05:33): And hopefully without any further ado, can I swap to the demo? I’m going to try and do this live. Hey, there we go. So this is me VPNing home currently. I dunno what time it is at home at the moment, probably three in the morning. So I’m not going to turn the plant light on because I’ll wake up my partner. But you can see the temperature, humidity, the humidity regulations actually doing quite well. And if I jump back about the last 24 hours, hopefully you can see based upon this graph here in Grafana, all of the times I’ve had peaks and troughs in the humidity. So you can see that as the moment it drops down, I kind of wait a minute based upon Grafana is alerting and then I trigger the humidifier and you can see the increase back to 80%. So it keeps it at a regulated humidity. What’s interesting is this bit, I went a little bit crazy with LLM’s earlier this year, and if I quickly view this panel here, sorry, that’s not very big.
(06:38): If I plus this one, hopefully that’s a little bit better. You can see what I’ve done here. Oh sorry, can we go back to the demo? Is that possible? Is the demo gone? Can we swap back to the, no, there we go. Okay, sweet. So we have this log here and essentially in this log is basically what I’ve done is I take a snapshot of the tank at 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM and basically what I do, sorry, 5:00 PM And what I do from there is I then take the picture, send it to ChatGPT OpenAI, and then I take that and process it and ask it to basically prompt as a plant doctor and I look for those crispiness in the pictures. I ask it to look for yellowing of leaves and then I convert it based upon a format back into logs into the OpenTelemetry format.
(07:31): And what you can see here is it actually amazingly detects the plants automatically. It even detects where they are in the position of the picture and gives me a warning level. It gives me plant diagnostics over them. So you can see some yellowing of the leaves on the top left one, maybe that’s a bit of stress on that plant. And another cool thing I did here was I did full tank analysis as well. So as well as sending the picture and aggregating the photo, I also send up the Prometheus temperature metrics and the humidity and then I ask it to have a look at those over the course of eight hours and process what exactly is going on. So that is the live demo. I can jump back. Oh sorry, I should show you the picture here they are TA and thanks to Volkov Labs for their plugin here. This, so I could only bring this picture in because of them. So if we swap back to the slides, hopefully.
(08:29): So to wrap up if I skip through these ones, that was just in case the demo gods were not in my favor. We have beautiful pitchers now these are lasting up to five months for me. Currently humidity is staying high, which is fantastic. My takeaways from this were that I actually reduced my water consumption. I was basically using the humidifier on an automated cycle every hour. I don’t need to do that anymore. So I went down from using three bottles of water a week, which was expensive. It needs to be reverse osmosis water or distilled water. And I reduced it to one. I needed a new terrarium. Well, I didn’t need a new terrarium, but I just wanted to buy a new terrarium. That looks really nice. So this has kept me really happy. It’s kept my partner really sad. We wanted to use that money on painting the living room, but here we are.
(09:22): And then for me, IoT projects taught me a lot about OpenTelemetry and also about PromQL. Coming from an Influx world, when I joined Grafana, I had to learn PromQL. And this for me was the way I grounded my experience in understanding a new query language. And last but not least, it gave me confidence to invest. I now, if you can see these two little juvenile Nepenthes here. Yeah, they cost me a small fortune from a really shady dealer down in South England. But I’m confident now that hopefully these will grow into adult plants and we’ll see what happens. Thanks very much. Come see me at the Experts booth. If you’d like to learn more about carnivorous plants.