Grafana Community MongoDB Plugin

This Open Source Grafana plugin allows for querying a MongoDB database or cluster.

This plugin is still in early development, and experimental. Everything is subject to change. Use at your own risk. Help Wanted.

Building

Tools Needed:

Node.js 14+
Golang 1.17+
Yarn
Mage

If you have Docker installed you can use ./build-env.sh to build and run a shell in a container with all necessary tools (or build-env.Dockerfile to build it yourself manually).

yarn install
yarn build
yarn backend

Installation

See integration-tests directory for configuration examples.

Production

Run

yarn plugin

Then copy the produced meln5674-mongodb-community.zip file to your artifact repository (e.g. Nexus) or web server (.e.g Nginx) of choice.

Bare Metal

Run

grafana-cli --pluginUrl <your repository url>/meln5674-mongodb-community.zip meln5674-mongodb-community

on your grafana host.

Docker

Set the environment variable

GF_INSTALL_PLUGINS=meln5674-mongodb-community=<your repository url>/meln5674-mongodb-community.zip

Kubernetes

Consult your grafana distribution documentation (e.g. https://github.com/bitnami/charts/tree/master/bitnami/grafana) for how to specify plugins to install

Development

Copy built repository to <grafana plugins dir>/meln5674-mongodb-community

Integration Tests

Tools Needed:

Docker
KinD
Helm
Kubectl

yarn integration-test

Live Development Environment

export KUBECONFIG=integration-test/kubeconfig
export INTEGRATION_TEST_NO_CLEANUP=1
export INTEGRATION_TEST_DEV_MODE=1
yarn integration-test

Grafana credentials: admin/admin

MongoDD credentials: root/root

MongoDB Test datasets:

test.weather { "metadata": { "sensorId": int, "type": string }, "timestamp": ISODate(...), "value": int }

Cleanup:

export INTEGRATION_TEST_NO_CLEANUP=
export INTEGRATION_TEST_DEV_MODE=
yarn integration-test

Limitations

Only aggregate queries are supported, but you can emulate find() et al using various pipeline stages. Supporting find would likely require implementing a graphical query editor to prevent fragility.
Grafana's data system requires that all values in a column be the same type. As such, queries from this plugin expect that a field will have the same type in all returned documents.
Currently, you need to specify the types of each value field. This will hopefully be addressed in a later update to enable schema inference.
Grafana only allows label values to be strings. For performance, this plugin considers, for example, integer 0 and string "0" to be the same label.
Only anonymous and Username/Password authentication is supported.

Help Wanted

Do you know about any of the following topics? If so, I'd love to hear from you!

React.js - Making the query editor UI not an eyesore
MongoDB - Providing representative sample data sets and queries to improve automated tests. Implementing other authentication types.
Grafana - Sample dashboards using the sample datasets
All three - Investigating implementing a graphical query builder.
Github - Implementing automated releases

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the following individuals/groups

James Osgood for writing the original plugin which inspired this one
Nikolay Stankov for PRs 1

gabrielmancini / grafana-mongodb-community-plugin