Grafana, the best visualization tool for monitoring?

Grafana is an open-source web application specialized in time-series visualization. Hence, it is suitable for the the purpose of monitoring. One of interesting facts is that Grafana is a fork from Kibana 3 to enhance the ability of dashboard editing and make it as a clean and elegant time-series visualization tool. To get the sense of Grafana dashboard, surf this link: https://play.grafana.org.

If you are looking for kind of visualization tool in business intelligent category, please consider other ones like Superset, Redash, etc.

Installation

CentOS 7 is a selected as demonstration, should be similar to other Linux distro.

1. Download and install, find the latest version from here.

wget https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana-6.5.2-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall grafana-6.5.2-1.x86_64.rpm

2. Start the server

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

3. Enable Grafana to start at boot

sudo systemctl enable grafana-server.service

You should be able to access Grafana UI after step#3, further configurations can be referred in step#4 & step#5 to make it ready for production.

4. Update /etc/grafana/grafana.ini file

• Server

  domain = vanducng.dev
  root_url = https://grafana.vanducng.dev

• SMTP/Email

  #################################### SMTP / Emailing ##########################
  [smtp]
  enabled = true
  host = mail.vanducng.dev:587
  user = [email protected]
  # If the password contains # or ; you have to wrap it with triple quotes. Ex """#password;"""
  password = xxxx
  #cert_file =
  #key_file =
  skip_verify = true
  from_address = [email protected]
  from_name = Grafana Alert
  # EHLO identity in SMTP dialog (defaults to instance_name)
  ;ehlo_identity = dashboard.example.com
  
  [emails]
  welcome_email_on_sign_up = true

• External storage

  #################################### External image storage ##########################
  [external_image_storage]
  # Used for uploading images to public servers so they can be included in slack/email messages.
  # you can choose between (s3, webdav, gcs, azure_blob, local)
  provider = s3
   
  [external_image_storage.s3]
  bucket = vanducng-services
  region = ap-southeast-1
  path = s3://vanducng-services/grafana-images
  access_key = xxxxx
  secret_key = xxxxx

5. Update /etc/grafana/ldap.toml

Grafana supports LDAP integration simply by editing this config file.

bind_dn = "cn=admin,dc=vanducng,dc=dev"
bind_password = 'xxx'

search_filter = "(uid=%s)"
 
search_base_dns = ["ou=people,dc=vanducng,dc=dev"]
 
group_search_filter = "(&(objectClass=groupOfNames)(memberOf=cn=admin,ou=grafana,ou=groups,dc=vanducng,dc=dev))"
group_search_base_dns = ["ou=grafana,ou=groups,dc=vanducng,dc=dev"]
#group_search_filter_user_attribute = "member=uid"

# Specify names of the ldap attributes your ldap uses
[servers.attributes]
name = "givenName"
surname = "sn"
username = "uid"
member_of = "cn"
email =  "mail"

# Map ldap groups to grafana org roles
[[servers.group_mappings]]
group_dn = "admin"
org_role = "Admin"
grafana_admin = true

Setting Alert

One of great feature on Grafana is ability to set alert to send email or notification.

• Email

Setup email channel as following, then limit trigger from particular metric on a dashboard will be sent to list of email.

• Push Notification

MSTeam is used for this demonstrattion, from your created group in MSTeam, follow below step to generate Webhook URL.

From Grafana, paste the Webhook URL from previous step with bellow settings: