Topic
Observability
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2 issues matching filters
Observability
- Field NotesJun 29, 2026
The Grafana dashboard built for the floor, not the engineer, and the reader retrofit that finally closed
Nine issues built a stack that ingests on a bounded disk, scores with a gated detector, and keeps a long-term feature record. None of it reaches the maintenance team until the page a technician opens at 6 a.m. answers the one question that brought them to it. Issue 10 builds that page: a single-asset status view backed by the feature bucket from issue 09, anomaly annotations driven off the same flags that fire the alert, and a data link that jumps from a flagged point to its pinned raw window. Plus the 30-day reader retrofit, now closed.
The stack the series has built across nine issues now ingests on a bounded disk, scores vibration with a gated detector, and keeps a long-term per-window feature record, but none of that work reaches the maintenance team, because the only human-facing output so far is a single Pushover alert that announces a problem without locating it. Issue 10 builds the Grafana dashboard the series has referenced since issue 05, and the governing decision is that it is built for the floor technician and not for the engineer who built the pipeline. The two read the same data with different questions. The engineer wants the detector's score distribution and the false-positive rate; the technician, paged at 6 a.m., wants to know which asset, how serious, since when, and what to look at. The layout answers the technician's sequence in order: a per-asset status row at the top that is green or red and nothing in between, the feature trends from the issue 09 feature bucket below it so the degradation is visible as a line rather than a single threshold crossing, and anomaly annotations drawn from the same flags that fire the alert so the page and the page that paged them agree. A Grafana data link on each flagged point carries the technician to the pinned raw window from issue 09, one click from the alert to the waveform. The high-rate vibration channel is never drawn at full rate, because a two-kilohertz series renders as a smear and tells the floor nothing; the dashboard shows features and downsampled trends and reserves the raw samples for the forensic drill-down. The whole dashboard is provisioned from a JSON model checked into git rather than assembled by hand in the browser, so it is reproducible and survives a VM rebuild. The recurring bill is unchanged at $5.50 a month. And the reader retrofit case study that has run open since issue 03 reached day 30 this week and is reported in full, with the reader's photographs and the comparison against the plant's existing monitoring contract.
Grafana·Dashboards·Influxdb·Flux·Observability·Human Factors - Field NotesMay 25, 2026
Grafana plus InfluxDB on $5.50/mo, against the vendor 'machine health platform'
Self-hosted observability on the same Hetzner VM that runs the Sparkplug B broker. What the open stack delivers, what it does not, and the honest read on the $1,200-per-asset-per-year quotes.
Issue 04 put OPC UA and Sparkplug B on the carrier and pointed both at a HiveMQ broker on a $5.50/mo Hetzner VM. Issue 05 puts the dashboards, the historian, and the alerting on top of it. Grafana plus InfluxDB plus Telegraf, all self-hosted on the same VM, fed by the Sparkplug subscriber. The result is a working machine-health dashboard with anomaly alerts, vibration trend, and 90-day retention for under six dollars a month. The comparison: a representative vendor 'machine health' SaaS quote at $1,200 per asset per year. What the open stack delivers that the SaaS does, what it does not, and which of the two should sit on a real plant floor.
Grafana·Influxdb·Telegraf·Self Hosted·Observability·Machine Health