Well, the advantage of more time on my hands and a working homelab is that I finally got round to installing Grafana! I have been reading up on this wonderful open source visualisation tool and wanted to use it… ever since I attended a FOSDEM session last year! I think this is a great tool to bring different data sources together and offer a complete stack view. I was contemplating attending Grafanacon next week, but the plane tickets to LA are a bit expensive… To console myself I installed version 6 beta 3 to learn everything new straight away.

I installed a Debian 9 vm in my vSphere environment with 2 vcpu, 4-GB RAM and a 50-GB disk. I played around with centos and ubuntu, but I think more and more of Debian as the clean, stable secure, mother of some other linuxes… and the CLI is so familiar with all my raspberry pis….

The Grafana install is very quick and painless. I just got some mixup when registering on their site. My username did not get through. Of course I did not read too much doc and I had not created a user in my instance yet… Worldping was not working… I almost immediately got some emails from Matt to point out something was wrong, which is rather impressive…

Anyways I have Worldping working, it is a plugin to monitor any services on the internet. When I pointed it to this blog it automatically connected DNS, ping and https to monitor! And installed some standard dashboards. This is a great quick intro to Grafana and a great way to get mileage out of it straight away!

I also connected Azure monitoring, since they announced a collaboration with Grafana. The only thing a bit involved here is setting up a service admin to connect to. It went flawless but now I need some data to display there…. I also played around with Darksky as a data source to get the weather forecast, but no luck so far. I will keep you updated. Next is connecting AWS and maybe setup Prometheus …

If you want to start with Grafana, head over to their website and access the install instructions there or use their hosted version. You can also find Grafana images on AWS or Azure.