Grafana Community MongoDB Plugin

This Open Source Grafana plugin allows for querying a MongoDB database or cluster.

This plugin is still in early development, and experimental. Everything is subject to change. Use at your own risk. Help Wanted.

Installation

This plugin is not currently signed. To install it, you have two options: Sign it yourself, or whitelist it as an unsigned plugin.

Signed

This is recommended for production environments.

To sign the plugin, build the plugin from source as described below, then execute

export GRAFANA_API_KEY=<See https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/developers/plugins/sign-a-plugin/#generate-an-api-key>
yarn plugin
yarn sign -- --rootUrls=<your grafana URL>

Then copy the produced meln5674-mongodb-community.zip file to your artifact repository (e.g. Nexus) or web server (.e.g Nginx) of choice, and note the URL to download the zip.

Unsigned

To install the plugin as unsigned, choose a version from the Releases Page, and either download the ZIP file, or copy its URL.

Installation methods

To view examples of installing the plugin see this directory. All examples use the ${ZIP_URL} variable to refer to either a URL from the releases page, or the URL your signed plugin is accessible from.

Development

Building

Tools Needed:

• Node.js 14+
• Golang 1.17+
• Yarn
• Mage

If you have Docker, installed you can use ./build-env.sh to build and run a shell in a container with all necessary tools (or build-env.Dockerfile to build it yourself manually). You can also execute ./build-env.sh <command> to execute a single command, batch-style, in this container.

To build, run

yarn install
yarn build
yarn backend

then to install into a development environment, copy built repository to <grafana plugins dir>/meln5674-mongodb-community

Integration Tests

Tools Needed:

• Docker
• KinD
• Helm
• Kubectl

yarn integration-test

Live Development Environment

export KUBECONFIG=integration-test/kubeconfig
export INTEGRATION_TEST_NO_CLEANUP=1
export INTEGRATION_TEST_DEV_MODE=1
yarn integration-test

Grafana credentials: admin/adminPassword

MongoDD credentials: root/rootPassword

MongoDB Test datasets:

test.weather { "metadata": { "sensorId": int, "type": string }, "timestamp": ISODate(...), "value": int }

Cleanup:

export INTEGRATION_TEST_NO_CLEANUP=
export INTEGRATION_TEST_DEV_MODE=
yarn integration-test

Limitations

• Only aggregate queries are supported, but you can emulate find() et al using various pipeline stages. Supporting find would likely require implementing a graphical query editor to prevent fragility.
• Grafana's data system requires that all values in a column be the same type. As such, queries from this plugin expect that a field will have the same type in all returned documents.
• Currently, you need to specify the types of each value field. This will hopefully be addressed in a later update to enable schema inference.
• Grafana only allows label values to be strings. For performance, this plugin considers, for example, integer 0 and string "0" to be the same label.
• Only anonymous and Username/Password authentication is supported.

Help Wanted

Do you know about any of the following topics? If so, I'd love to hear from you!

• React.js - Making the query editor UI not an eyesore
• MongoDB - Providing representative sample data sets and queries to improve automated tests. Implementing other authentication types.
• Grafana - Sample dashboards using the sample datasets
• All three - Investigating implementing a graphical query builder.
• Github - Implementing automated releases

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the following individuals/groups

• James Osgood for writing the original plugin which inspired this one
• Nikolay Stankov for PRs 1