Within the world of robotics and automation one of the most recurring needs is that of capturing and visualizing real-time data from hardware components such as sensors and actuators, which provide insights into how a system is behaving overall and helps diagnose any potential issues that might arise overtime.

Historically, it has required quite a bit of custom development effort with complex tooling to be able to stream such data onto dashboards within typical analytics and visualization tools, including Grafana. But with the release of Grafana 8.0, it has become much easier to be able to stream and visualize real-time data using the new streaming API that was introduced as part of the Grafana Live feature.

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