Grafana as Azure Stream Analytics output

Question

I am pushing events to my Event hub, then this data is being analyzed in Azure Stream Analytics. I'd like to visualize output from stream analytics in Grafana. What is the easiest approach to achieve this?

Answer 1

If I remember correctly, Grafana doesn't store data locally, you need to define a data source on top of one of the compatible storage systems.

Azure Stream Analytics doesn't come with a storage layer either, it's compute only.

So if you want to use ASA and Grafana, you need to output data from ASA to a data source that is supported by Grafana in ingress.

Looking at both lists that leaves only MSSQL via Azure SQL (hopefully it's compatible) as a native option. It's not a bad option for narrow dashboards, or if you intend to store your data in a RDBMS anyway. You can store your entire payload in an NVARCHAR(MAX) if you don't plan to consume the data in SQL.

But being clever, we can actually use the Functions output to write to any other store, or call any API. I'm not sure if Grafana has a direct ingestion API, but Azure Monitor does and it's a supported data source in Grafana.

The other option would be to go through ADX as explained in the other answer.

Not straightforward but doable ;)

Answer 2

Azure Stream Analytics job can natively ingest the data into Azure Data Explorer. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-data-explorer/azure-data-explorer-is-now-supported-as-output-for-azure-stream/ba-p/2923654

You can then use the Azure Data Explorer plugin in Grafana. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-data-explorer/azure-data-explorer-is-now-supported-as-output-for-azure-stream/ba-p/2923654

Another option is to use Power BI instead of Grafana. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/stream-analytics/stream-analytics-power-bi-dashboard