grafanimate 0.10.0

Prerequisites

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

grafanimate

pip install grafanimate

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

To use the headless mode which renders all panels on a dashboard and use panel events instead of waiting a fixed duration run

grafanimate --scenario=playdemo --output=./animations--headless --use-panel-events

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

Configuration

Firefox Location

grafanimate will discover a Firefox installation on your system path. If you need to configure a specific installation location, use the environment variable FIREFOX_BIN to point to the Firefox executable on your system.

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

luftdaten.info coverage

• 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

• Data source: luftdaten.info (LDI)

• Production: Luftdatenpumpe, LDI data plane v2, historical.

• Development: Erneuerung der Luftdatenpumpe. All contributions welcome.

DWD CDC

• 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

• Data source: Clemens Gruber (CG)

• Development: How to Visualize 2-Dimensional Temperature Data in Grafana

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:

__grafanaSceneContext.state.$timeRange.setState({ from: from, to: to});
__grafanaSceneContext.state.$timeRange.onRefresh();

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.

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.