Grafana is an open source metric analytics & visualization tool which can help us to monitor the system with a nice Dashboard.
Step 1: Installing Grafana
Grafana is available in the APT packages repository, however it could not be the latest version, so we’ll use the official Grafana repository.
First, it is needed to create the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list and add the following into it:
deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main
There is a separate repository for beta releases:
deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb beta main
Then it is needed to add the GPG Key, in order to install signed packages:
$ curl https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
Refresh your APT cache to update your package lists.
$ sudo apt update
Then make sure Grafana will be installed from the official repository.
$ apt-cache policy grafana
Now, we can proceed with the installation of Grafana.
$ sudo apt install grafana
Once installed, now we can start it.
$ sudo systemctl start grafana-server
We should check now Grafana has started OK (active (running)).
$ sudo systemctl status grafana-server
And finally, enable Grafana to start at boot time.
$ sudo systemctl enable grafana-server.service
Step 2: Installing Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. We are going to use the APT tool to install it:
$ sudo apt-get install prometheus prometheus-node-exporter
After this, we should check we have 2 new TCP connections listen on port 9090 and 9100.
$ netstat -plunt
Also, we could see that on port 3000 it is listening Grafana.
Step 3: Login into the system
Once installed Grafana & Prometheus, you can access Grafana site from a Web Browser. The URL is the IP address of the web server (or the domain), and the port is the 3000. The first page you should see is this.
You can login with the admin/admin credentials. Once logged, you have to change the password of the admin account.
Step 4: Setting up the Prometheus Data Source
Grafana needs to add new data sources.
Step 5: Creating the new Dashboard
Grafana has lots of Grafana Dashboards created by different users which are shared in the Grafana Dashboard URL. I use the “Node Exporter Full” Dashboard, so I only have to add the 7039 ID in the import Dashboard tool of Grafana.
Update (2019-Feb): As Prometheus-node-exporter has been updated (0.15.2), and some counters has changed, so it is needed to use another Grafana Dashboard. I recommed to use the 5174 ID.
Update (2020-May): Again a new update of prometheus-node-exporter (0.18.1), and some counters have changed, so I used a different Grafana Dashbord: 1860 ID.
And finally, we have the Dashboard created with several statistics to monitor our server.
References:
- http://docs.grafana.org/installation/debian
- https://prometheus.io/docs/guides/node-exporter
- https://grafana.com/dashboards/7039 (For prometheus-node-exporter 0.15)
- https://grafana.com/dashboards/5174 (For prometheus-node-exporter 0.16)
- https://grafana.com/dashboards/1860 (For prometheus-node-exporter 0.18 or newer)