Grafana Integration

Grafana can connect directly to Novant to visualize zones, spaces, assets, sources, and point data from your building automation systems alongside any other data source you already monitor in Grafana. By using Novant as the shared data foundation, your dashboards stay aligned with your normalized building model — no manual tagging or one-off data exports required.

This integration enables:

Building dashboards with live and historical Novant point data
Browsing Novant entity metadata (zones, spaces, assets, sources, points) as Grafana tables
Mixing building data with other Grafana data sources for cross-system views
Driving Grafana alerts from normalized point values
Using Grafana template variables for portfolio-wide dashboards

The integration is provided by the open-source Novant Data Source for Grafana plugin, available on GitHub.

Prerequisites

Grafana 10.0 or later
A Novant API key (ak_...) — see API Authentication

Quickstart with Docker

The fastest way to try the integration is with Docker Compose. This pulls Grafana, installs the plugin from the latest GitHub release, and pre-adds the Novant data source:

services:
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      - GF_INSTALL_PLUGINS=https://github.com/novant-io/novant-grafana/releases/download/v1.2.0/novant-datasource-1.2.0.zip;novant-datasource
      - GF_PLUGINS_ALLOW_LOADING_UNSIGNED_PLUGINS=novant-datasource
    volumes:
      - grafana-data:/var/lib/grafana
    configs:
      - source: novant_datasource
        target: /etc/grafana/provisioning/datasources/novant.yaml

configs:
  novant_datasource:
    content: |
      apiVersion: 1
      datasources:
        - name: Novant
          uid: novant
          type: novant-datasource
          access: proxy
          editable: true

volumes:
  grafana-data:

Then:

Run docker compose up
Open http://localhost:3000 and sign in (default admin / admin)
Go to Connections → Data sources → Novant
Paste your Novant API key and click Save & test

A successful health check displays the connected project name.

Update the version in the GF_INSTALL_PLUGINS URL to match the latest release on GitHub.

Manual Installation

To install the plugin into an existing Grafana instance, download the .zip from the Releases page and unpack it into your Grafana plugins directory. Because the plugin is unsigned, you must also allow it to load in grafana.ini:

[plugins]
allow_loading_unsigned_plugins = novant-datasource

Restart Grafana to load the plugin.

Building Queries

Once the data source is configured, open any dashboard panel, choose the Novant data source, and pick a Query Type:

Query Type	Returns
`trends`	Time series of point values
`values`	Current point values
`points`	Point metadata
`sources`	Source listing
`assets`	Asset listing
`spaces`	Space listing
`zones`	Zone listing

ID fields accept comma-separated lists and support Grafana template variables (e.g. $point_ids). For trends, the dashboard time range is sent to Novant as start_date / end_date, with selectable Interval and Aggregate options.

For full configuration steps, query examples, and development details, refer to the plugin README, which contains the most up-to-date instructions.