How to fetch additional data for a flux query from a json file

My buddy Romses is currently taking care of the Datenzwerg deployment at 38c3, and like at every event where we deploy them I’m updating our page and Grafana dashboard with the locations of the gnomes.

So far the latter was always quite annoying: We have only the names of the gnomes in our influx data, and adding the location/deployment status to the graph thus meant having something like this for every single graph:

import "strings"
import "dict"

locations = [
    "Bashful": "Uptime Bar",
    "Dopey": "c3cat",
    "Grumpy": "Späti",
    "Happy": "Kidspace",
    "Hefty": "HASS Assembly",
    "Moopsy": "Chaospost",
    "Kinky": "Eventphone",
    "Nerdy": "House of Tea",
    "Sleepy": "DDOS Bar",
    "Sneezy": "Wohnzimmer"
]

from(bucket: "datagnome")
  [...]
  |> map(fn: (r) => ({r with device: r.device + " (" + dict.get(dict: locations, key: r.device, default: "?") + ")"}))

Which of course means that I had to update this locations dict for every single panel, on every single deployment, at least twice (start and end of the event).

I finally decided I had to solve this differently and just now figured out how to keep the deployment info in a JSON file on our git repo and then querying that from the graphs, instead of manually keeping the lookup data updated in more than one place:

import "strings"
import "dict"
import "http/requests"
import "experimental/json"

response = requests.get(url: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/romses/Datenzwerg/refs/heads/main/docs/deployment.json")
data = json.parse(data: response.body)
locations = dict.fromList(pairs: data)

from(bucket: "datagnome")
  [...]
  |> map(fn: (r) => ({r with device: r.device + " (" + dict.get(dict: locations, key: r.device, default: "?") + ")"}))

So far seems to work well, and I’m very happy to be able to do this faster now (and also more easily from my phone, should I need to).

Next step: Figuring out how to use that JSON file to also keep the event box on the home page updated. But that’s for another day :)