Tracking planes with Grafana in real time: How to visualize the aircraft overhead with your own dashboard

Alex Burnett shares his journey of creating a real-time aircraft tracking dashboard using Grafana, combining his passion for planes with his expertise as a Senior Solutions Architect at Grafana Labs. Leveraging an ADS-B receiver, a Raspberry Pi, and software-defined radio (SDR) technology, he collects aircraft data, which is then processed and visualized through Grafana's geomap panel. This setup enables him to monitor nearby aircraft in real time, using dynamic visualization features to display flight paths and other details. Burnett provides a detailed guide on the setup process, highlighting the simplicity and accessibility of the required hardware and software, along with the benefits of using Grafana Cloud Logs for data ingestion. He also shares his plans to expand his tracking projects to include trains, showcasing the versatility of Grafana for visualizing coordinate-based data.