Hey there data enthusiasts! Ever find yourself drowning in a sea of numbers and logs, desperately trying to make sense of it all? Enter Grafana, the superhero of data visualization!

In a world where information overload is the norm, Grafana swoops in to save the day. It’s not just a tool; it’s your trusty sidekick in the quest for understanding your metrics, logs, and traces. From tech geeks to data dabblers, Grafana’s got something for everyone.

After installing Prometheus, we will install Grafana to visualize data from Prometheus (and many other Data Sources).

Prerequisites

  • Server running Ubuntu 22.04
  • User with sudo privileges
  • Minimum hardware requirements 1 CPU and 512MB

Install Grafana

Install prerequisite packages

sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common wget

Import the GPG key

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings/
wget -q -O - https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg > /dev/null

Add a repository for stable releases

echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg] https://apt.grafana.com stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list

Update Grafana sources list

sudo apt-get update

To Install Grafana OSS

sudo apt-get install grafana

To Install Grafana Enterprise

sudo apt-get install grafana-enterprise

Start the server

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start grafana-server
sudo systemctl status grafana-server

Accessing the Grafana UI

The UI should be accessible with your browser using the IP of your server and port 3000.

The default username and password are admin/admin. after login in, you will be prompted to create a new password (this is highly recommended)

You can reset the admin password by running the following command.

sudo grafana-cli admin reset-admin-password NEWPASSWORD

Conclusion

With Grafana you can monitor server performance, track application metrics, or just enjoying the sheer beauty of your data. In the next article we will use node exporter to monitor servers.