Deploy Graphite with Grafana on Ubuntu 14.04

Graphite is an enterprise-level monitoring tool renowned for performing well on systems with limited resources. It stores numeric time-series data and renders graphs of this data on demand. This guide provides an introduction to the installation and basic setup of Graphite together with Grafana, a popular open source application for visualizing large-scale measurement data, on Ubuntu 14.04.

1. Familiarize yourself with our Getting Started guide and complete the steps for setting your Linode’s hostname and timezone.

2. This guide will use sudo wherever possible from an example account named graphite. Complete the sections of our Securing Your Server guide to create the graphite user, harden SSH access, remove unnecessary network services and set up a firewall. You may need to create additional firewall rules for your specific application.

3. Update your system:

   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
   

1. Install the system packages required for working with Graphite:

   sudo apt-get install build-essential graphite-web graphite-carbon python-dev apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi libpq-dev python-psycopg2
   

   During the installation of graphite-carbon, you will be asked if you want to remove the whisper database files should you ever uninstall Graphite. Answer No to this prompt. You can always remove the files later (which are located in /var/lib/graphite/whisper).

1. Configure the retention rate for test metrics by adding a [test] block to Carbon’s storage-schemas.conf file. This step is given for testing purposes only and can be safely skipped if you have no use to generate test metrics.

   The retention times given below will save data every 5 seconds for 3 hours, and a separate set of data from that aggregated sample every 1 minute for 1 day.

   File: /etc/carbon/storage-schemas.conf

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   [carbon] pattern = ^carbon\. retentions = 60:90d [test] pattern = ^test\. retentions = 5s:3h,1m:1d [default_1min_for_1day] pattern = .* retentions = 60s:1d

   For more information on how to configure Carbon storage, see the section storage-schemas.conf in Graphite’s documentation.

2. Copy the default aggregation configuration to /etc/carbon so we can configure our own settings:

   sudo cp /usr/share/doc/graphite-carbon/examples/storage-aggregation.conf.example /etc/carbon/storage-aggregation.conf
   

   storage-aggregation.conf describes aggregation policies Carbon uses to produce less detailed metrics, such as the 1m:1d retention in the [test] block added above. By default, only the average metric value is taken, which will result in data loss when, for example, you need maximum and minimum values. For this reason, [min],[max] and [sum] sections are found in the configuration file.

3. Enable Carbon’s cache to run on boot:

   File: /etc/default/graphite-carbon

   1	CARBON_CACHE_ENABLED=true

4. Start the Carbon cache service:

   sudo service carbon-cache start
   

1. Install PostgreSQL for the graphite-web application:

   sudo apt-get install postgresql
   

2. Change to the postgres user and create a database user for Graphite:

   su - postgres
   createuser graphite --pwprompt
   

   You will be asked to provide a password for the new database user. After that, create the databases graphite and grafana with the system’s graphite user as the owner:

   createdb -O graphite graphite
   createdb -O graphite grafana
   

3. When finished configuring the PostgreSQL databases, change back to the graphite user:

   su - graphite
   

1. Update Graphite’s DATABASES dictionary definition with the settings for the PostgreSQL database created earlier:

   File: /etc/graphite/local_settings.py

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   DATABASES = { 'default': { 'NAME': 'graphite', 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2', 'USER': 'graphite', 'PASSWORD': 'graphiteuserpassword', 'HOST': '127.0.0.1', 'PORT': '' } }

2. Also add the following lines to the end of the file:

   File: /etc/graphite/local_settings.py

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   USE_REMOTE_USER_AUTHENTICATION = True TIME_ZONE = 'Your/Timezone' SECRET_KEY = 'somelonganduniquesecretstring'

   • TIME_ZONE is your Linode’s time zone, which will be used in graphs. For possible values, run timedatectl or see the TZ column in Wikipedia’s timezone database.

   • SECRET_KEY is a long and unique string used as a salt when hashing passwords.

3. Initialize the database with:

   sudo graphite-manage syncdb
   

4. Then answer the prompts to create a superuser account which will be used to access Graphite’s web interface.

1. Copy Graphite’s Apache config template into Apache’s sites-available directory:

   sudo cp /usr/share/graphite-web/apache2-graphite.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available
   

2. Change Graphite’s port from 80 to 8080 (port 80 will be used for Grafana later).

   File: /etc/apache2/sites-available/apache2-graphite.conf

   1	<VirtualHost *:8080>

3. Make sure Apache is listening on port 8080. Add Listen 8080 after Listen 80 in ports.conf:

   File: /etc/apache2/ports.conf

   1 2	Listen 80 Listen 8080

4. Disable the default Apache site to avoid conflicts:

   sudo a2dissite 000-default
   

5. Enable Graphite’s virtual site:

   sudo a2ensite apache2-graphite
   

6. Reload Apache to apply the changes:

   sudo service apache2 reload
   

   Now you should be able to access Graphite by going to your Linode’s hostname or IP address using port 8080 in a web browser (ex: example_domain.com:8080). You’ll see the Graphite landing page as shown below:

   

1. Generate some test metrics with the following command:

   for i in 4 6 8 16 2; do echo "test.count $i `date +%s`" | nc -q0 127.0.0.1 2003; sleep 6; done
   

2. Wait for the command prompt to be returned. Refresh the page and you should see a new test.count metric in the tree on the left:

   

1. Add Grafana’s repository to sources.list:

   echo 'deb https://packagecloud.io/grafana/stable/debian/ wheezy main' |  sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
   

2. Add the Package Cloud key to install signed packages:

   curl https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
   

3. Update apt and install Grafana:

   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install grafana
   

4. Configure Grafana to use the PostgreSQL database created earlier:

   File: /etc/grafana/grafana.ini

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   [database] # Either "mysql", "postgres" or "sqlite3", it's your choice type = postgres host = 127.0.0.1:5432 name = grafana user = graphite password = graphiteuserpassword

5. Also in /etc/grafana/grafana.ini, configure the domain and root_url, and set a strong admin password and secret key:

   File: /etc/grafana/grafana.ini

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   [server] protocol = http http_addr = 127.0.0.1 http_port = 3000 domain = example.com enforce_domain = true root_url = %(protocol)s://%(domain)s/ [security] admin_user = admin admin_password = SecureAdminPass secret_key = somelongrandomstringkey

6. Enable proxy modules for Apache reverse proxying to work:

   sudo a2enmod proxy proxy_http xml2enc
   

7. Create an Apache site configuration file to proxy requests to Grafana. Remember to change example.com to your own domain:

   File: /etc/apache2/sites-available/apache2-grafana.conf

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   <VirtualHost *:80> ProxyPreserveHost On ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/ ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000/ ServerName example.com </VirtualHost>

8. Enable Grafana’s site configuration with:

   sudo a2ensite apache2-grafana
   

9. Configure Grafana to run after boot and then start service:

   sudo update-rc.d grafana-server defaults 95 10
   sudo service grafana-server start
   

10. Restart Apache to load the new modules and configuration changes:

    sudo service apache2 restart
    

    At this point, you should be able to open your Linode’s domain or IP address in a browser to see Grafana’s login page.

1. Log in into Grafana using the admin credentials you specified in grafana.ini above.

2. Click on Data Sources and select Add new. Fill in all the fields as shown in the screenshot below:

   

   Click Save to create the new Data Source.

3. Now, before creating a graph, add more test data for the test.count metric by again running:

   for i in 4 6 8 16 2; do echo "test.count $i `date +%s`" | nc -q0 127.0.0.1 2003; sleep 6; done
   

4. Create a new dashboard by clicking the Home button and then + New:

   

5. Add a Graph panel to the newly created dashboard:

   

6. Edit the Graph panel properties by clicking the tab with the words no title (click here). Then click Edit:

   

7. Make sure the graphite data source you’ve created is chosen in the dropdown box at the bottom right (marked as 1 in the screenshot below). In the dropdown at the top right corner (marked as 2), choose Last 15 minutes.

   Click select metric. Choose test and then count (marked as 3) to add the test metric you previously created. At this point, the sample data should appear on the graph.

   Finally, click the Save button (marked as 4) to save the dashboard you just created.

   

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

• Installing Graphite
• Configuring Carbon
• Installing Grafana on Debian/Ubuntu
• Adding Graphite data source to Grafana