Alex's Grafana Guide
This is by no means the “Ultimate” guide to Grafana. This is merely a nudge in the right direction to start learning.
Quick Note
Before we get started we need to go over a few things. First up, this guide was written from a Windows user point of view. With that said the guide will be making use of Hyper-V. If you do not have a Pro edition of Windows 10 or are using Windows Server then you will need to use a different hypervisor package/software. VMware Player, Virtualbox, etc as examples.
Secondly, this guide was also written before Grafana 7 was released. So some images may be out of date. The steps should still be correct.
Third, a few of the files needed in this guide are hosted on a dogbin instance I manage myself. If you try to grab the files and are getting a 500/404 error please reach out to me. Usually I spot the issues before anyone else but I’m not perfect!
Guide Completion Chart
- Creating a Virtual Machine 100%
- Installing Ubuntu Server 100%
- Secure SSH access to Ubuntu 100%
- Setup and Install Docker 100%
- Deploy InfluxDB, Grafana, and Telegraf 100%
- Deploy Prometheus in Docker 100%
- Placing Grafana behind Caddy 100%
The above chart shows the completion status of each guide page. If more pages are added to the guide the status will update to show WIP or Completed.
Pre-Requisites
Here are the things you will need to have ready to complete this guide.
- Windows 10 Pro or Windows Server
- Virtualization enabled in your PC’s UEFI/BIOS
- A decent file editor. (I recommend VS Code)
- 2-3 hours of free time.
- A decent internet connection for fast downloads.
Table of Contents
These are the main guide pages.
Grafana Guide – You are here!
Deploying & Configuring Telegraf on Linux
Telegraf on Windows as a Service
Click here to see posts with examples of addons you can use with this guide. These posts are not part of the main guide!
Guide Key
Text rendered like this is a NOTE
Text rendered like this is an OPTIONAL step
Text rendered like this is a WARNING
Special Thanks
These people took the time to go through the guide and help fix issues and make a few more things clearer. Thank you so much!
- Scott H. – GEE Group Member
- Tom C. – GEE Group Member
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can't access "bin.alexsguardian.net" material
The material hosted at https://bin.alexsguardian.net is controlled by me (Alex) and sometimes the material can be come inaccessible. Usually these are the reasons:
- Internal systems update caused the server to reboot.
- Try to access the material again in a few minutes or so.
- Webserver rebooted for systems upgrade.
- Same as #1. Try again in a few minutes.
- Server crashed.
- Sometimes this happens. A banner will be displayed on the website letting you know with an ETA for fix.
- curl / wget issues.
- Usually user issue. Try using a browser to retrieve the material instead of CLI.
I can't run a hypervisor.
If you can’t run a hypervisor on your machine then you will have to direct install each application. That is out of the scope for this guide.