Using Grafana as a representation layer for control data at the European XFEL

At European XFEL the control system Karabo has been developed for operating photon beamlines and instruments. The time series database InfluxDB is used as a backend for logging control data. Whilst Karabo exposes interfaces to retrieve and present the historical data stored in InfluxDB, there are benefits in using an established solution such as Grafana. This interface enables close to real-time monitoring of the control data using web-based, customizable panels called dashboards. In this paper we present the example of using Grafana as a presentation layer for the Karabo control system at the Data Operation Center (DOC) in XFEL. Common monitoring scenarios and diagnostics use cases as well as lessons learned are discussed.