Running Grafana on Your Breeze

Introduction

Grafana is a powerful open-source visualization platform for monitoring data. It connects to various data sources (Prometheus, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch) and creates beautiful, interactive dashboards.

Installation

sudo apt install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common
wget -q -O - https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg] https://apt.grafana.com stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y grafana
sudo systemctl enable --now grafana-server

Access and Initial Setup

Access Grafana at http://your-ip:3000. Default login is admin/admin. Change the password immediately.

Adding Data Sources

1. Navigate to Connections → Data Sources
2. Choose your source type (Prometheus, MySQL, etc.)
3. Enter the connection details and click Save & Test

Creating Dashboards

1. Click Dashboards → New Dashboard
2. Add a panel and select your data source
3. Write a query or use the visual query builder
4. Customize the visualization type (graph, gauge, stat, table)

Popular Pre-built Dashboards

• Node Exporter Full (ID: 1860) — comprehensive server monitoring
• MySQL Overview (ID: 7362) — database metrics
• Nginx (ID: 12708) — web server stats

Import via Dashboards → Import → Enter ID.