This quick tutorial will guide you to install grafana to monitor a linux system. We also are going to save a history to an influx database.

Installing InfluxDB

For Ubuntu

curl -sL https://repos.influxdata.com/influxdb.key | sudo apt-key add -
source /etc/lsb-release
echo "deb https://repos.influxdata.com/${DISTRIB_ID,,} ${DISTRIB_CODENAME} stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list

Install and start theInfluxDB service:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install influxdb
sudo service influxdb start

Now you can check at the port 8083 (for a local installation check http://localhost:3000)) that the InfluxDB is working.

SCREENSHOT

Since InfluxDB default config is a little insecure let’s change some settings:

sudo vim /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

Now search for auth-enabled and set it to true.

it’s recommended to enable also https-enabled

using the influx-cli create the admin user (remeber to start the service with influxd):

influx

CREATE USER leonardo WITH PASSWORD 'use_secure_password' WITH ALL PRIVILEGES

Installing Grafana

We need to download the official .deb file (please check the updated .deb here http://grafana.org/download/)

wget https://grafanarel.s3.amazonaws.com/builds/grafana_3.1.1-1470047149_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -y adduser libfontconfig
sudo dpkg -i grafana_3.1.1-1470047149_amd64.deb
sudo service grafana-server start

Now check that Grafana web interface is working on localhost at port 3000 (for a local installation check http://localhost:3000).

SCREENSHOT

Sign up with a new user and then open the grafana configuration (/etc/grafana/grafana.ini) to uncomment admin_user and admin_password

admin_user = new_user
admin_password = password

Then restart grafana

sudo service grafana-server start

Configure InfluxDB data source. Since telegraf database is not yet created an error is expected. Add the datasource as the following screenshot shows.

SCREENSHOT

Collect and metrics reporting

Now we need a Grafana pluging to collect and report metrics, in this case we are going to use telegraf (https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf_1.0.0-beta3_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i telegraf_1.0.0-beta3_amd64.deb

Next step is to configure the pluging. Telegraf can generate a file with specific inputs and outputs, you can use the -input-filter and -output-filter flags

telegraf -sample-config -input-filter cpu:mem:net:swap -output-filter influxdb:kafka > telegraf.conf

The last command will create a config to monitor CPU, memory, network and swap.

Now we need to add telegraf as a service.