Set up Grafana-BigQuery

Grafana lets you build custom dashboards to visualize data. In this section we explain how you set up Grafana with Google BigQuery as the data source.

Prerequisites: Google Parquet data lake

  1. Set up Google Parquet data lake [~10 min]

Note

The above steps are required before proceeding


Set up Grafana and add BigQuery data source

  1. Make sure you have completed the prerequisites above
  2. Set up a Grafana Cloud starter account (100% free) and login
  3. Go to the Google BigQuery plugin and click ‘Install plugin’
  4. In Grafana go to ‘Connections/Data sources/Add new data source’ and select BigQuery
  5. Ensure ‘Name’ is Google BigQuery
  6. Under ‘JWT token’ load your <id>-bigquery-user-account.json[1], then click ‘Save & test’
  7. Enable the ‘Cloud Resource Manager API’ via the URL when prompted, then click ‘Save & test’

Note

The name of the data source must be Google BigQuery for our template dashboards to work

Deploy your first dashboard

Grafana-BigQuery dashboard template
  1. Download our bigquery-dynamic-dashboard template
  2. Go to ‘Dashboards/New/Import’, upload the updated template and click ‘Load’
  3. Go to ‘Settings/Variables/dataset’ and set it to match the one in your BigQuery project
  4. Verify that your data is loaded in the dashboard as expected[2]

Note

The default template dataset value is lakedataset1 - if your name differs, you must update it


You are now ready to customize your dashboard.

[1]This file was stored by the Terraform deployment in your input bucket root
[2]You may need to change the time period via the upper-right menu to navigate to your data