Grafana cloud - Graphite or Prometheus for IoT device pushing data?

Hi all,

We’re looking to subscribe to Grafana cloud and make use of either the Graphite or Prometheus DB as data source.

Our use case is as follows:

  • A number of IoT devices each push data with 20+ parameters to an S3 server
  • We use a Python script to process the data into time series data (e.g. vehicle speed)
  • We wish to “push” this data into a suitable data source for displaying it in Grafana
  • In Grafana, we wish to be able to create a simple dashboard of e.g. 5 different parameters
  • Further, we wish to be able to easily switch between the IoT devices from e.g. a dropdown

We wish to avoid running any DB server ourselves - it is our understanding that with e.g. Graphite via the Grafana cloud, we’ll not need to run any servers ourselves - we’ll just write directly to the Grafana hosted storage. Is this correct?

From what we understand, Graphite or Prometheus should be able to serve as data source - but we’re unsure which one is the most well-suited for this.

Further, we’d ideally need a simple way to “push” the data into the DB from Python. I looked at Graphite, but struggled to find a good Python client example for e.g. pushing time series data into a specific endpoint.

Any tips are welcome!