Grafana at continental scale: Monitoring the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)

The National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON project, is a continental-scale ecological monitoring network comprising 47 terrestrial and 34 aquatic field sites across the United States. Using a suite of scientific instruments and custom automation, 23,000 unique data streams are collected from 3,500 data loggers, comprising 5 billion data points per day. In this session, NEON IT Service Administrator Robert Hamnett will share the suite of Grafana dashboards that monitor every NEON sensor onsite alongside its supporting IT infrastructure. Technicians use these dashboards at NEON sites while performing maintenance to determine sensor health and function, while remote staff utilize these dashboards mirrored on the cloud to monitor cross-site performance and look for systemic issues at a continental scale. NEON has interesting and unique challenges maintaining this level of infrastructure in remote, rugged areas, and improving the ability to detect these issues and infer cause remotely has the potential to completely revolutionize how technicians maintain NEON sites while saving time and money.

Speakers

Robert Hamnett
Robert Hamnett
IT Service Administrator IV  •  National Ecological Observatory Network
Robert has spent the last 12 years working a variety of roles in ecological research in Hawai’i and across the U.S. with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Robert has a passion for developing creative solutions to complex problems and a knack for leveraging open source software to solve real-world challenges. Currently developing monitoring solutions for all 81 NEON field sites utilizing Grafana.