MQTT data source for Grafana

The MQTT data source plugin allows you to visualize streaming MQTT data from within Grafana.

Disclaimer

This plugin does not provide a storage for your events. It means, that if you want to query your historical data - this plugin is not for you. This datasource provides you an access to MQTT connetcion, which could be used to get Retained topics, but NOT intended to work with historical data. If you want to work with historical data please take a look for some storage engine like Loki to store events that you recieve from MQTT.

Requirements

The MQTT data source has the following requirements:

• Grafana user with a server or organization administration role; refer to Permissions.
• Access to a MQTT broker.

Configure the data source

Add a data source by filling in the following fields:

Basic fields

Field	Description
Name	A name for this particular MQTT data source
URI	The scheme, host, and port of the MQTT Broker. Supported schemes: TCP (tcp://), TLS (tls://), and WebSocket (ws://)

Authentication fields

Field	Description
Username	(Optional) The username to use when connecting to the MQTT broker
Password	(Optional) The password to use when connecting to the MQTT broker

Query the data source

The query editor allows you to specify which MQTT topics the panel will subscribe to. Refer to the MQTT v3.1.1 specification for more information about valid topic names and filters.

Known limitations

• The plugin currently does not support all of the MQTT CONNECT packet options.
• This plugin automatically supports topics publishing numbers, strings, booleans, and JSON formatted values. Nested object values can be extracted using the Extract Fields transformation.
• This plugin automatically attaches timestamps to the messages when they are received. Timestamps included in the message body can be parsed using the Convert field type transformation.

Install the plugin

Installation Pre-requisites

Refer to: Building a Streaming Datasource Backend Plugin

Details: Ubuntu Windows

Meet compatibility requirements

This plugin currently supports MQTT v3.1.x.

Note: Since this plugin uses the Grafana Live Streaming API, make sure to use Grafana v8.0+

Installation Steps

1. Clone the plugin to your Grafana plugins directory.
2. Build the plugin by running yarn install and then yarn build.

NOTE: The yarn build command above might fail on a non-unix-like system, like Windows, where you can try replacing the rm -rf command with rimraf in the ./package.json file to make it work.

3. Run mage reloadPlugin or restart Grafana for the plugin to load.

Verify that the plugin is installed

1. In Grafana from the left-hand menu, navigate to Configuration > Data sources.
2. From the top-right corner, click the Add data source button.
3. Search for MQTT in the search field, and hover over the MQTT search result.
4. Click the Select button for MQTT.