Best way to realize a dashboard for a fleet management

Hello,

(I’m very new to Grafana)

I would like to create a live (near real time) tracking system of a fleet of around 1000 to 2000 vehicles. I mean to be able to visualize the vehicles locations and get information about them, like speed, battery, origin location, destination, people on board, …

the refresh rate would be 1-2 seconds (ideally less if possible)

Our framework is already generating mqtt messages with required information

I’ve seen mainly two type of works going in that direction, but I’m confused as new to grafana … and also It seems to me those works have not been updated recently so Im’ not sure their status … and also, grafana is evolving very quickly that makes it a bit more difficult to keep up to date on latest improvement …

Here is a summary of what I’ve detected :

  • mqtt-datasource : very promising plugin to subscribe to mqtt topics. seems to manage only one level message like {‘lat’:‘xxx’,‘long’:‘yyy’}, what about more complex message with several levels … I’ve seen work started on that direction but now new for several months now … (can’t find it … seems it was from Ali Atif)

  • inluxdb + grafana live + geomap (worldmap) : perhaps the generic solution for near real time, what about mqtt in that case? would it be possible to connect the mqtt bus ? what about the capability of refresh rate … ? here is a very good example (Using Grafana to Monitor EMS Ambulance Service Operations | Grafana Labs) but inluxdb + mqtt seems to be in their next path …

Do you have any idea about what would be the best approach as of now ?

Thanks all, have a good day.

2 Likes

Welcome here,

I have used this and it works really well

There were on the conference a demo controlling a drone mqtt+Grafana to demonstrate the capabilities.

You can have as many fields in the JSON as you need.

This is 260 point been monitored
image

1 Like

Hello, it has been a while since I’ve asked this question,

Thanks Johans, I’m not sure I’ve investigated the combination influxdb + grafana live, both separately yes, but not the combination. I’ll have a look, thanks. About the fields in the json message, the thing is that our infrastructure is already delivering multi-levels messages, and I need to flatten them for now, but this remains a minor issue.

I’ve elaborated a number of options for the data sources part, using mqtt-datasource plugin (that is based on grafana live in fact), influxdb (using 100ms refresh rate) and grafana live websockets. I can not say that one is really ideal for now, but, at least, I think they will match my first requirements, and let me time to dig in further.

concerning the real time map, to me the current option (using leaflet) won’t support several hundred of animated points, and tweeking the geomap by adding a WEB GL compatible library will be required in the future (perhaps leaflet now (or will) allows that …). Still to be elaborated.

thanks all, have a good day.

Olivier
I’m sorry, I don’t have time to elaborate on the solutions I have now and I’ll really want to do that later (in case it could help someone else). Nevertheless, if you have specific questions, I’ll try to answer at my best.