Categories
Monitoring

Grafana Visualisation

Turns time-series databases and more into useful visualisation of that data it empowers you to graph, alert on, and explore data you have collected and supports Prometheus natively.

Again with most really good open-source software, the easiest way of getting it up and running is with docker there is an official Grafana built docker image which is based off Alpine Linux for more information about the docker image visit this link

# to start you grafana container run the below.
docker run -d --name=grafana -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana

Update and install on OS

If you don’t want to do the docker container or would like to know how to install the software follow the below for ubuntu

# update the apt database
sudo apt-get update

# install the prerequisites 
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https
sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common get

# add the key
wget -q -O - https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

# add the repo 
sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main"

# update the apt database
sudo apt-get update

# install grafana
sudo apt-get install grafana

Start the service

# configure Grafana to start when the system starts
sudo systemctl enable grafana-server.service

# start the service and check status
sudo systemctl start grafana-server
sudo systemctl status grafana-server

Now visit your server IP on port 3000 http://X.X.X.X:3000

Default logins are:

Username: admin
Password: admin

Getting the Data

when you have access your grafana install be it docker or local install you will have to add a data source

add a data source we will add Prometheus as there is a blog post about setting that up here

add there Prometheus server

and after some time and a lot playing around, we are able to come up with some dashboards winning

Beyond this Post

We need to look at alerting and securing this install. but for now, have fun with the data you have and setting up graphs think how you can get not just one device CPU memory etc, but multiple devices with a composite metric of the health of service running on the infrastructure Red Amber or Green (RAG) how are you going to present that to the consumer of this.

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