If you do not know what Pi-hole is I definitely recommend you look into it. Especially if you want to block ads/telemetry on all your home network devices.
Now there are probably a few ways to do this but for my dashboard I ended up using a script to send pi-hole stats to InfluxDB. I currently have Pi-Hole running on a VM under Ubuntu Server 17.10.
This script can be run remotely but you will need to use the authentication method described in the repo.
First we need to install python-pip. So SSH to your Pi-Hole server and run:
sudo apt-get install python-pip -y
Now create a new directory for the script to live in.
mkdir /opt/pihole-influx
Clone the pi-hole-influx repo.
git clone https://github.com/janw/pi-hole-influx.git /opt/pihole-influx
Once that finishes, cd to /pihole-influx and run:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Now clone the config.example.ini to config.ini.
cp config.example.ini config.ini
Edit the config.ini file to match your environment.
nano config.ini
| [InfluxDB] | |
| port | 8086 |
| hostname | <if.of.influx.db> |
| username | pihole |
| password | pihole |
| database | pihole |
| [pihole] | |
| api_location | address of the /admin/api.php of your pi-hole instance |
| instance_name | hostname |
You can scrape multiple pi-hole instances if you run more than 1 by adding a second config block called [pihole_2], etc. I’d recommend using a docker container if you plan to use more then one pi-hole instance.
Save and close the config.ini file.
Lastly, you need to create the InfluxDB database that your pi-hole stats will reside in. Will need to match what you put in the database = databasename section in your config.ini.
curl -XPOST "http://<ip.of.influx.db>:8086/query?u=<admin user>&p=<password>" --data-urlencode "q=CREATE DATABASE "pihole"" curl -i -XPOST "http://<ip.of.influx.db>:8086/query?u=<admin user>&p=<password>" --data-urlencode "q=CREATE USER "pihole" WITH PASSWORD "pihole"" curl -XPOST "http://<ip.of.influx.db>:8086/query?u=<admin user>&p=<password>" --data-urlencode "q=GRANT WRITE ON "pihole" TO "pihole"" curl -XPOST "http://<ip.of.influx.db>:8086/query?u=<admin user>&p=<password>" --data-urlencode "q=GRANT READ ON "pihole" TO "grafana""
Now launch piholeinflux.py.
./piholeinflux.py
Running piholeinflux.py as a service.
You can setup piholeinflux.py to run as a systemd service so that it will auto launch at boot time if you ever have to reboot your server.
Create the piholeinflux.service file.
nano piholeinflux.service
Paste the below info into your new .service file.
User=pi #YOUR USERNAME ExecStart=/usr/bin/python /home/USERNAME/pihole-influx/piholeinflux.py
Save and close the .service file. Then run the following in order:
sudo ln -s /opt/pihole-influx/piholeinflux.service /etc/systemd/system sudo systemctl enable piholeinflux.service sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl start piholeinflux.service
If you get an error while running make sure you can A: communicate to InfluxDB and B: the “USER=” in the .service file is set to a user that can run it (i.e. root or you).
Setting up the Grafana Dashboard
Pi-Hole Data Source
- Select the cog on the left hand side and click “data sources”
- Click “add data source”
- Click InfluxDB
- Enter the following information and hit “Save & Test”
If you get an error, double check your connection info for typos!
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | pi-hole |
| URL | http://<ip-of-influx.db>:8086 |
| Database | pihole |
| user | grafana |
| password | grafana |
Dashboard Setup
Now you can import a basic dashboard using the ID from the script’s repo. This will give you some basic info from your Pi-hole data source.
Dashboard ID: 6603
HOWEVER, there are a few issues with it. First you will want to edit the Realtime Queries and add: non_negative_derivative or add math(* -1) to each of the queries, under “Metrics”, so the Y-Axis has no negative values.
Docker Container Version
You can deploy this script using the below Dockerfile and config.ini
FROM alpine as builder RUN apk add --no-cache git WORKDIR /app RUN git clone https://github.com/janw/pi-hole-influx.git FROM python:3-alpine WORKDIR /usr/src/app COPY --from=builder /app/pi-hole-influx/requirements.txt /usr/src/app RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt COPY --from=builder /app/pi-hole-influx/piholeinflux.py /usr/src/app COPY config.ini . CMD [ "python", "./piholeinflux.py" ]
[influxdb] port = 8086 hostname = 10.9.9.120 username = pihole password = allthosesweetstatistics database = pihole # Time between reports to InfluxDB (in seconds) reporting_interval = 10 [pihole] api_location = http://10.9.9.120/admin/api.php instance_name = pihole timeout = 10
Copy both of the above blocks into the same folder.
docker build -t your-name/of-image .
Thanks to my co-worker for throwing together this easy, lightweight Docker container version. Also since it doesn’t require a mounting volume, it should work in swarm mode!
Edit 4/29/19: Updated to match new Grafana guide settings.