How to visualize SurrealDB data with Grafana

Whether your data is on the moon or in your basement, Grafana has got you covered. As the go-to platform for monitoring and observability, Grafana has been your trusty sidekick for data visualization for years, in part because we’re always looking for new ways to support our users, no matter where they keep their data.

That’s why we’re excited to tell you about our latest supported data source — SurrealDB. We’ve built an experimental version of a SurrealDB data source, helping you bring together SurrealDB’s next-gen, multi-modal database capabilities with Grafana’s user-friendly visualization prowess.

Let’s take a quick look at SurrealDB and show you how easy it is to visualize your SurrealDB data directly in Grafana. 

What is SurrealDB?

With more than 24,000 stars on GitHub, SurrealDB is an open source database designed for developers building modern applications. It can support a wide range of use cases, including web, mobile, and backend applications. 

Here’s a recap of some of SurrealDB’s key features:

• Real-time collaboration. SurrealDB can be used as a database and an API backend service.
• Multimodal. SurrealDB supports SQL querying from client devices, GraphQL, ACID transactions, WebSocket connections, structured and unstructured data, graph querying, full-text indexing, and geospatial querying.
• Granular access control. SurrealDB provides row-level, permissions-based access control.

SurrealDB plugin features

When you install the SurrealDB data source, you’ll be taken to the config editor, which looks like this:

Creating the data source is easy. First, you provide an endpoint with credentials. Then, you just test that the data source works and you’re done!

Note: For security reasons, we recommend that you give Grafana read-only access to your data.

The SurrealDB plugin launches with just the basics today. You can write queries in SurrealQL using the built-in query editor, although Grafana features like macros are not supported for now. But don’t worry — we plan to add a Query Builder UI like we do for our other data sources down the road. 

We aim to expand on this plugin as much as we can over the coming months with the help of our amazing community. This SurrealDB data source is being released in an experimental state, with the primary goal of gathering user feedback and gauging interest in the plugin. We aim to understand its utility and popularity within the community to determine the feasibility and value of further development. 

Based on the feedback and the level of interest received, we will evolve this plugin through subsequent stages, including a public preview with an expanded set of features, followed by a general availability (GA) release. 

Your input is invaluable to us in this process, as it will shape the future direction and enhancements of the SurrealDB data source in Grafana. So please feel free to open a discussion thread on GitHub if you have any questions or suggestions, or submit an issue on GitHub for bug reports.

Learn more about the SurrealDB plugin

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the code and documentation on GitHub, and install it in your pre-production Grafana setup for some tinkering. Since it’s an experimental plugin, we’re eager to hear your feedback, feature requests, and PRs!

Never used SurrealDB before? No problem! The folks at SurrealDB have you covered. They have an example dataset you can download and experiment with in your own instance of SurrealDB.

As for what’s next, keep an eye on our GitHub discussions and issues for all the latest updates. We welcome contributions, both big and small, to both the discussion and the code itself! We also plan to our catalog of data sources this year, so stay tuned for more there in the months ahead.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!