Monitoring dynamic IoT setup through live dashboards

Problem

An vertical farming company needed to monitor the health of various systems in their farms, including water supply systems and growing systems. These systems consisted of various IoT (Internet of Things) devices that were often moved around and replaced, making the system setup dynamic. Besides, new systems were frequently added to create new farms or extend existing ones.

Solution

Nubis proposed using Grafana to display the dashboards. Grafana is a flexible platform that supports templating functionality, allowing for the definition of templates for different types of dashboards needed.

To address the dynamic nature of the system setup, Nubis implemented an adaptable software layer between the raw data from the farm, the farm control interface and the new Grafana-based dashboards. The software layer generated dashboard templates on the fly based on farm configuration, data context and user control settings, and connected data from the database to the dashboard for live high-availability monitoring and data mining. Users without technical knowledge could define advanced views and manipulate data in their browsers.

Conclusion

The solution allowed the client to always have up-to-date data, and they could easily redesign the dashboards. This enabled the company to efficiently monitor their systems’ health and make informed decisions for better farming outcomes.