Setting up Grafana

There are RPM packages available to Crunchy Data customers through the Crunchy Customer Portal. Otherwise the Grafana RPM Package can be downloaded and installed from https://grafana.com/grafana/download. There is no difference between the Crunchy provided package and the one directly from Grafana.

• Included Dashboards
• Installation
  • Linux
• Upgrading
• Setup
  • Linux

Included Dashboards

pgMonitor comes with several dashboards ready to be used with automatic provisioning. They provide examples of using the metrics from the postgres_exporter and node_exporter. Since provisioned dashboards cannot be edited directly in the web interface, if any custom changes are desired, it is recommmended to make a copy of them and make your changes there.

Installation

Linux

With RPM Packages

There are RPM packages available to Crunchy Data customers through the Crunchy Customer Portal.

If you install the below available packages with RPM, you can continue reading at the Setup section.

Available Packages

Without Packages

Create the following directories on your grafana server if they don’t exist:

mkdir -p /etc/grafana/provisioning/{datasources,dashboards}
mkdir -p /etc/grafana/crunchy_dashboards

Review the crunchy_grafana_datasource.yml } file to ensure it is looking at your Prometheus database. The included file assumes Grafana and Prometheus are running on the same system. DO NOT CHANGE the datasource name if you will be using the dashboards provided in this repo. They assume that name and will not work otherwise. Any other options can be changed as needed. Save the crunchy_grafana_datasource.yml file and rename it to /etc/grafana/provisioning/datasources/datasources.yml . Restart grafana and confirm through the web interface that the datasource was provisioned and working.

Review the crunchy_grafana_dashboards.yml file to ensure it’s looking at where you stored the provided dashboards. By default it is looking in /etc/grafana/crunchy_dashboards . Save this file and rename it to /etc/grafana/provisioning/dashboards/dashboards.yml . Restart grafana so it picks up the new config.

Save all of the desired .json dashboard files to the /etc/grafana/crunchy_dashboards folder. All of them are not required, so if there is a dashboard you do not need, it can be left out.

Upgrading

If you’d like to take advantage of the new provisioning system in Grafana 5 provided by pgmonitor 2.x, we recommend either renaming or deleting your existing datasources and dashboards so there are no issues when the provisioned versions are imported.

Please review the ChangeLog for pgMonitor and take note of any changes to metric names and/or dashboards. Note that if you are using the included dashboards that are managed via the provisioning system, they will automatically be updated. If you’ve made any changes to configuration files and kept their default names, the package will not overwrite them and will instead make a new file with an *.rpmnew extension. You can compare your file and the new one and incorporate any changes as needed or desired.

Setup

Setup on Linux

Configuration Database

By default Grafana uses an SQLite database to store configuration and dashboard information. We recommend using a PostgreSQL database for better long term scalability. Before doing any further configuration, including changing the default admin password, set the grafana.ini to point to a postgresql instance that has a database created for it.

In psql run the following:

    CREATE ROLE grafana WITH LOGIN;
    CREATE DATABASE grafana;
    ALTER DATABASE grafana OWNER TO grafana;
    \password grafana

You may also need to adjust your pg_hba.conf to allow grafana to connect to your database.

In your grafana.ini, set the following options at a minimum with relevant values:

[database]

type = postgres
host = 127.0.0.1:5432
name = grafana
user = grafana
password = """mypassword"""

Now enable and start the grafana service

sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
sudo systemctl start grafana-server
sudo systemctl status grafana-server

Navigate to the web interface: https://<ip-address>:3000. Log in with admin/admin (be sure to change the admin password) and check settings to ensure the postgres options have been set and are working.

Datasource & Dashboard Provisioning

Grafana provides the ability to automatically provision datasources and dashboards via configuration files instead of having to manually import them either through the web interface or the API. Note that provisioned dashboards can no longer be directly edited and saved via the web interface. See the Grafana documentation for how to edit/save provisioned dashboards: http://docs.grafana.org/administration/provisioning/#making-changes-to-a-provisioned-dashboard. If you’d like to customize these dashboards, we recommend first adding them via provisioning then saving them with a new name. You can then either manage them via the web interface or add them to the provisioning system.

The extras package takes care of putting all these files in place. If you did not use the crunchy package to install Grafana, see the additional instructions above. Once that is done, the only additional setup that needs to be done is to set the “provisioning” option in the grafana.ini to point to the top level directory if it hasn’t been done already. If you’re upgrading from Grafana 4.x to 5.x, you will have to add the “provisioning” option to the [paths] section of the grafana.ini file. Once that is done, just restart grafana and all datasources and dashboards should appear.

[paths]
provisioning = /etc/grafana/provisioning