Create visualisations and cool dashboards

The subject of this tutorial is Grafana, which is an open source software that provides visualisations and dashboards for time-series databases and data using a web interface. As Grafana cannot work in isolation, it needs to get its data from one or multiple external sources. Put simply, this means that you will need to have other software installed on your Linux machine that collects and stores data for Grafana to read data. As a result, if you want to use Grafana in a professional environment or experiment with it for learning purposes, you will have to set up and configure all the desired software components on your own, because the limited space of this tutorial cannot cover all supported software and configurations – it is in such situations that software like Docker comes in handy as it enables you to easily reproduce complex environments using set configuration files.

The main purpose of this tutorial, therefore, will be to gently illustrate the capabilities of Grafana without presenting too many installation and configuration commands – the list of installation commands and configuration files depends mainly on the scenario that you are trying to implement.

Docking Grafana

The easiest way to get and begin using it as soon as possible is by downloading and running its official image. Apart from the image, you will is mainly being used via a web interface, the use of the image simplifies things and enables you to experiment without making changes on your current Linux system. The downside is that any changes you make to the image will be lost when the container exits – this is the price you pay for simplicity. Download the image by executing docker pull grafana/grafana. After that, run the image by executing docker run -d --name=grafana -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana