Introduction to Grafana

Grafana is a widely-used open-source data visualization and monitoring platform, developed by Grafana Labs. It is designed to turn time-series data, readings collected over time from sensors, servers, or other monitored systems, into interactive dashboards and charts, making trends, anomalies, and system health easy to interpret at a glance.

Within the Ackcio ecosystem, Grafana is integrated as an extension of Snape 2.0. It is used exclusively for two purposes:

Data visualization: plotting node health, signal strength, battery level, temperature, pressure, and sensor readings on interactive, time-filterable charts.
Email alerting: automatically notifying assigned recipients by email when a sensor reading crosses a defined threshold.

NOTE: Grafana alerting in this deployment supports email notifications only. SMS, WhatsApp, and physical/blinking alarm outputs are not supported.

This manual walks through both capabilities in the order they are typically configured: accessing the visualization dashboards, setting up the email server (SMTP) that alerts are sent from, and then creating alert rules on individual sensor parameters.