Support for realtime data / authentication

[nmaas87]

Dear all,

thanks for providing this plugin. I never really had the chance to implement the 1.0.0 version, however, I played around with 2.0.0 last week and it was a very pleasent experience :)!

However, I really wanted to ask wheter realtime data and authentication are planed to be implemented - first thing would be really useful as Grafana can expand the functionality of Yamcs quite much in regard of longterm / trend analysis over longer periods of time (e.g. watching a data quality graph for whole shift periods to see potential bad periods on downlinks) - second thing is just somewhat of a necessity.

Thank you very much :)

Nico

[fqqb]

Hi, thanks for feedback.

We would like both, but currently a few things are more urgent (for example: you can't view aggregate members).

In grafana the realtime option is called 'streaming'. Implementing this for the current-value query type would probably be quite straightforward. I anticipate the difficulty will be more regarding the query types that show past + present.

For authentication, I think you can already do it by configuring basic auth in the datasource settings. That's not the best solution (credentials are attached to every request). I would like token-based auth instead (like our other clients).

[fqqb]

And actually Yamcs could use some API token implementation, since the authentication is server-to-server (Grafana -> Yamcs).

[xpromache]

About the realtime/stream option: if you put it on a 5 seconds refresh rate, there won't be so much difference vs a realtime option.

[nmaas87]

@xpromache For (realtime) longterm trend analysis that is right, with the drawback of Grafana pulling the Yamcs database and creating higher than necessary system load. For (realtime) analysis during OPS / visualization of certain parameters, these 5+ seconds refresh rate can be a challenge, regarding the type of OPS :)

[nmaas87]

Just FYI, Grafana 8.x does allow Real-time streaming via to dashboards via websocket connection
( https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/whatsnew/whats-new-in-v8-0/ / https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/live/ )

[bangpradyumna]

In grafana the realtime option is called 'streaming'. Implementing this for the current-value query type would probably be quite straightforward. I anticipate the difficulty will be more regarding the query types that show past + present.

@fqqb - Could you provide some pointers on how to add realtime support to current-value query type using streaming ? Also, would love to know if you have any ideas around showing past+present(realtime) data.

Thanks

[fqqb]

This has not been worked on. Well, I did look at it a while back but came to the conclusion a significant rewrite of this plugin would be necessary: both a frontend and a backend grafana plugin is required, whereas currently we only use a frontend plugin). Hence, this has been pending.

For clarity: the current implementation does have capability to show both past+present data, except it uses a polling interval to refresh all data (e.g. each 5 sec.). This works, but doesn't scale well.

[xpromache]

@bangpradyumna if you feel inspired, please have a look at the requirements for the Grafana backend (it has to be developed in Go as far as I understand):

https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/developers/plugins/backend/