u vertica-grafana-datasource

Overview

This is a work-in-progress Grafana plugin to support the Vertica database.

It defines a new datsource that communicates with Vertica using the Vertica golang driver. [http://github.com/vertica/vertica-sql-go]. Due to this, we needed to implement both front and and back end components using the largely-undocumented backend framework.

Setting Up Your Development Environment

1. Set up a Go development environment with the appropriate GOROOT and GOPATH envrionment variables.
2. Download Grafana itself and build it per their instructions. [http://github.com/grafana/grafana]
3. Install npm [http://nodejs.org]
4. Install dep [https://github.com/golang/dep]
5. Start Grafana once by running the grafana-server binary you built in step 2.
6. Create a symbolic link from the Grafana's plugin directory to this project's 'dist' directory thusly:

ln -s (this_dir)/dist (grafana_dir)/data/plugins/vertica-grafana-datasource 

Note: If using Grafana 7.0.0, it now requires signed plugins. The Vertica plugin is unsigned so you will need to add the following configuration parameter to the /etc/grafana/grafana.ini file in the [plugins] section for it to load. Restart the Grafana server after adding this change. allow_loading_unsigned_plugins = vertica-grafana-datasource

Logging

You can enable backend logging by setting two variables. On your Grafana server node...

export VERTICA_GRAFANA_LOG_FILE=(log file name)
export VERTICA_GRAFANA_LOG_LEVEL=[ DEBUG|INFO|ERROR|WARN|FATAL ] (default is INFO)

After that, you can simply watch the log file.

Using Grafana Docker Image

It is possible to run the grafana/grafana Docker image instead of a local grafana-server binary.

1. Build the drivers source
   • dep ensure
   • Building on Linux?

     ./build.sh
     

   • Otherwise

     cd backend
     GOOS=linux go build -o ../dist/vertica-grafana-datasource_linux_amd64
     cd ..
     

2. Start the grafana Docker image
   • docker-compose up -d
3. Confirm that server has started
   • docker-compose logs
4. Open web browser to localhost:30000/
5. Cleanup the container, after testing
   • docker-compose down -v

Rapid Development Cycle

1. Make your code changes.
2. Run './build.sh'
3. Ctrl-C and re-run grafana-server
4. Repeat until tired.