Grafana and its installation

Overview and Introduction

While you can create custom dashboards within Graphite, the interface leaves much to be desired from both an aesthetic and functional point of view – this is where Grafana comes in. Grafana has a much more refined interface that presents the ability to create advanced dashboards from several different data sources. Grafana also contains a powerful query editor that allows you to filter data using patterns to ensure only the proper data is illustrated.

Installation

sudo su - yum install initscripts fontconfig 
cd ~ 
wget https://grafanarel.s3.amazonaws.com/builds/grafana-2.0.0_beta3-1.x86_64.rpm 
yum localinstall grafana-2.0.0_beta3-1.x86_64.rpm 
/etc/init.d/grafana-server 
start chkconfig grafana-server on

Configuration

Grafana uses sqllite by default. If you want to use some other database then go to /etc/grafana/grafana.ini and edit the configuration

Using

Grafana will be running on port 3000 of your ip-address. So go to

<ip-address>:3000

The default username and passoword are admin

Instruction copied from here - http://www.dburkland.com/how-to-setup-grafana-with-graphite-and-create-basic-dashboards/

• With the Grafana web interface still up click “Home” in the upper right hand cornerUnder “Load dashboard from Graphite-Web” select “graphite” for the data source field and click “List dashboards” under and ensure that no errors get returned (Hint no results will be returned)
• Once you have verified the graphite data source is working properly click on “Dashboards” on the left side of the screen (under the Grafana logo)* You can then create a new dashboard by clicking on “Home” and then “New”Create a basic graph by hovering over the green vertical rectangle and by selecting “Add Panel” -> “Graph”
• Edit the graph by clicking the title and selecting “edit”Give the graph a name by selecting the “General” tab and by specifying a custom name in the “Title” text field
• Next you will select “Metrics” -> “graphite” -> “graphite” to ensure that the proper data source is utilized for this graph
• Specify a metric by clicking “select metric” -> netapp-performance -> “select metric” -> Clusters -> “select metric” -> -> “select metric” -> SVMs -> “select metric” -> -> “select metric” -> Volumes -> “select metric” -> * -> TOTAL_OPS
• Once you are done customizing this graph you can add more (or quit) by pressing the “Back to dashboard” button at the top of the pageYou should now see the recently created graph on your dashboard however you will need to save your changes. You can do this by clicking the floppy disk icon (at the top of the page) -> specifying a dashboard name in the text field -> clicking the floppy disk icon to the right of the text field.
• If you wanted to set aforementioned dashboard as the default you can click the floppy disk icon (at the top of the page) -> “Save as Home”Your end result will look something like this: