Dashboard Your Data in Databend Cloud with Grafana

Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. With Grafana, you can create, explore, and share beautiful dashboards with your team and foster a data driven culture.

Databend Cloud offers integration with Grafana. In this post, I will demonstrate how to create a dashboard for your data in Databend Cloud using Grafana, using the Anonymized Web Analytics dataset (hits_v1) from ClickBench as an example. Databend Cloud provides this dataset as a data loading sample out-of-the-box. To load the data into Databend Cloud, you can click Load Data after logging in, and then select Anonymized Web Analytics Data.TSV (7.5G) from the available datasets.

Before integrating, you need to refer to the Install Guide and set up an instance of Grafana in your environment, or create a free account with Grafana Cloud to use the cloud service.

Step 1. Install Altinity plugin for ClickHouse

1. Click the gear button in the sidebar on the Grafana homepage, and then select Plugins.
2. On the Plugins tab, search for and install Altinity plugin for ClickHouse.

Step 2. Create Data Source

1. On the sidebar of the Grafana homepage, click the gear button, and then select Data sources.

2. On the Data sources tab, select Add new data source.

3. Search for and select the data source type Altinity plugin for ClickHouse.

4. Configure the data source. To obtain the URL and SQL account information for the Databend Cloud warehosue, refer to https://docs.databend.com/using-databend-cloud/warehouses/connecting-a-warehouse

   Setting	Description
   URL	The host address of the Databend Cloud warehouse, for example: https://tnf34b0rm--small-book.ch.aliyun-cn-beijing.default.databend.com. Please note that the address should start with https://.
   Access	Select “Server (default)”.
   Auth	Select "Basic auth".
   User/Password	After selecting "Basic auth", please fill in the SQL username and password for connecting to the warehouse in the Basic Auth Details.
   Additonal	Select "Add CORS flag to requests".

5. Click Save & test. If the page displays Data source is working, it means that the data source has been successfully created.

Step 3. Create Dashboard

1. Click the Dashboards button in the sidebar on the Grafana homepage, and then select New Dashboard > New Panel.
2. Select the data source created in Step 2, and then select the default database and hits_100m_obfuscated_v1 table in order after FROM.

3. Click Go to Query, then copy and paste the following SQL statements:

SELECT
    eventtime as t,
    count()
FROM $table
GROUP BY t
ORDER BY t

4. After a short moment, the view will appear at the top of the page. Then click Save in the upper right corner.