Solar Data Handling With Prometheus, Grafana And Docker

Paul Goulbourn
Solar Data Handling With Prometheus, Grafana And Docker

Now that we can pull the data from the local solar inverters, we need somewhere to store it. The excellent solismon3 discussed in the last post presents a simple page that Prometheus can consume to store the historic data.

The reporting partner to Prometheus is Grafana. This allows the creation of graphs/basic reporting of the data like this :

Data Logger Web Interface

To bundle everything together I created two solismon3 docker images with the configuration for each inverter added. I then used docker-compose to run those along with Prometheus and Grafana as follows :

services:
    prometheus:
      image: prom/prometheus
      container_name: prometheus
      volumes:
        - ./prometheus/data:/prometheus
        - ./prometheus/prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
      expose:
         - 9090
      ports:
         - 9090:9090

    grafana:
      image: grafana/grafana-oss
      container_name: grafana
      volumes:
        - ./grafana/data:/var/lib/grafana
      expose:
         - 3000
      ports:
         - 3000:3000


    solismon3-hybrid:
      restart: unless-stopped
      image: solismon3-hybrid
      container_name: solismon3-hybrid
      expose:
         - 18000
      ports:
         - 18000:18000


    solismon3-v5:
      restart: unless-stopped
      image: solismon3-v5
      container_name: solismon3-v5
      expose:
         - 18001
      ports:
         - 18001:18001

The data volumes and configuration files are mapped into the containers from the local file system. I’ve chosen to expose the solisman endpoints to the host to make debugging easier.

I had a soare rasberry pi 4 and it seems easily powerful enough to run all the containers.

Prometheus needs to be told to connect to the solisman3 endpoint. Given that all the containers are running together, you can use the container-names defined in docker-compose within the Prometheus configuration :

global:
  scrape_interval: 1m
  scrape_timeout: 10s
  evaluation_interval: 1m

scrape_configs:

- job_name: solarmon
  honor_timestamps: true
  scrape_interval: 1m
  scrape_timeout: 10s
  metrics_path: /metrics
  scheme: http
  follow_redirects: true
  static_configs:
  - targets:
    - solismon3-hybrid:18000

- job_name: solarmon-v5
  honor_timestamps: true
  scrape_interval: 1m
  scrape_timeout: 10s
  metrics_path: /metrics
  scheme: http
  follow_redirects: true
  static_configs:
  - targets:
    - solismon3-v5:18001