Monitor Your System with Graphite and a Grafana Dashboard

What are Graphite and Grafana?

Graphite is an open-source monitoring tool for storing and viewing time series data. It does not collect data, but has a simple interface and integrates easily with third-party tools. Grafana allows you to connect to a Graphite installation (or other data source) and build dashboards to view and analyze the data.

This guide uses Docker Compose to run the official Grafana and Graphite containers and connect them to a user-defined network. This makes it easy to securely connect a Grafana dashboard to the Graphite database.

Why use Grafana over Graphite’s visualization?

Graphite has a built-in Composer for the user to view metrics visually and also offers a rich render API. That being said, Graphite’s built-in visualization is rudimentary, and the developers suggest Grafana for a “more modern UI,” that is “another great way to interact with Graphite data and it offers many more visualization types than the native Composer” (see the bottom of the page at https://graphiteapp.org/quick-start-guides/graphing-metrics.html).

Installing Graphite and Grafana

Both Docker and Docker Compose are necessary to complete this guide.

Install Docker

To install Docker CE (Community Edition), follow the instructions within one of the guides below:

• Installing and Using Docker on Ubuntu and Debian

• Installing and Using Docker on CentOS and Fedora

For complete instructions on even more Linux distributions, reference the Install Docker Engine section of Docker’s official documentation.

Install Docker Compose

1. Download the latest version of Docker Compose. Check the releases page and replace 1.25.4 in the command below with the version tagged as Latest release:

    sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.25.4/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
   

2. Set file permissions:

    sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
   

Docker Compose Configuration for Graphite and Grafana

1. Create a directory:

   mkdir ~/grafana && cd ~/grafana
   

2. In a text editor, create docker-compose.yml and add the following content:

   File: docker-compose.yml

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

   version: "3" services: grafana: image: grafana/grafana container_name: grafana restart: always ports: - 3000:3000 networks: - grafana-net volumes: - grafana-volume graphite: image: graphiteapp/graphite-statsd container_name: graphite restart: always networks: - grafana-net networks: grafana-net: volumes: grafana-volume: external: true

   This Compose file uses the official Docker images for both Graphite and Grafana. It also specifies a network to connect the containers.

3. Since the data volume is external, create it manually:

   docker volume create --name=grafana-volume
   

4. Bring up the configuration:

   docker-compose up -d
   

5. Check that both containers started successfully:

   docker ps
   

   CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                         COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                                                                     NAMES
   494e45f7ab56        grafana/grafana               "/run.sh"           19 seconds ago      Up 7 seconds        0.0.0.0:3000->3000/tcp                                                    grafana
   49881363d811        graphiteapp/graphite-statsd   "/sbin/my_init"     19 seconds ago      Up 7 seconds        80/tcp, 2003-2004/tcp, 2023-2024/tcp, 8080/tcp, 8125-8126/tcp, 8125/udp   graphite

Add a Data Source for Graphite and Create a Grafana Dashboard

1. In a browser, navigate to port 3000 on the Linode’s FQDN or public IP address (192.0.2.0:3000). The Grafana login page loads:

2. Log in using the default admin account (username and password are both admin).

3. Click Create data source in the main dashboard and fill in the form as follows:

   

   • Name: Graphite
   • Type: Graphite
   • URL: http://graphite:8080
   • Access: Server (Default)
   • Version: Select the newest available. 1.1.3 in this example.

   Click Save & Test.

4. Click New dashboard to create and customize a new panel:

   • To import a sample Dashboard, try the Internal Grafana Stats.

     1. Click New dashboard at the top, then Import dashboard.
     2. Type 55 into the Grafana.com Dashboard box, and click Load.
     3. Select Graphite in the data source dropdown, and click Import.

5. Click the floppy disk icon or press CTRL+S to save.

6. Click Add users to access the user management configuration tab.

7. Hover over the user icon in the lower-left corner of the sidebar and click Preferences to open a menu where you can replace the default admin username and password with something more secure:

   

Next Steps

Graphite does not collect data by itself. See the Graphite documentation for a list of third-party tools to add data for visualization. A larger, distributed deployment of Graphite may not be suitable for the containerized approach taken in this guide. If this is your use case, see their documentation on installing Graphite from scratch.

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.

• Grafana Official Documentation
• Graphite Official Documentation