Case Study: CSS Electronics visualizes CAN IoT data with Grafana

With Grafana and InfluxDB, CSS Electronics Visualizes CAN IoT Data to Monitor Vehicles and Machinery

CSS Electronics, a manufacturer of industrial-grade CAN bus data loggers, needed a simple way for its customers to decode raw CAN bus telemetry and visualize it in a user-friendly format. Working with Grafana, the company wanted to make it easy to process CAN data from both local files and cloud storage, while supporting a wide range of vehicle and machinery monitoring use cases without requiring a hosted service.

Grafana helped CSS Electronics build a plug-and-play integration using Python, InfluxDB, and Grafana dashboards. The solution decodes MF4 CAN log files with DBC files, pushes the data into InfluxDB, and makes it available in Grafana for telematics visualization, alerts, and device switching. The result is an easy-to-set-up, automatable workflow that supports remote debugging, diagnostics, and predictive maintenance, with one customer reporting that the approach saves significant time and costs by eliminating the need for physical site visits.

CSS Electronics

Martin Falch

Co-Owner and Head of Sales and Marketing