Recently I read a blog post from Lindsay Hill where he show his process to install Grafana. Wanting to have something similar within my own environment, I decided to do the same but on CentOS.

Base installation of CentOS

I won’t go into detail with this part. I’ll just mention that I had a minimal install of CentOS that was fully patched as of the installation.

Install InfluxDB

I hope to make use of InfluxDB in other ways within my work – hopefully I can write on this in the future. To install InfluxDB, I just referenced the online documentation:

[root@server ~]# cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/influxdb.repo
...
[root@server ~]# yum install influxdb
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
influxdb                                                                                                                                                                                                          | 2.5 kB  00:00:00     
influxdb/7/x86_64/primary_db                                                                                                                                                                                      |  27 kB  00:00:00     
...
Installed:
  influxdb.x86_64 0:1.5.1-1                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Complete!

This process included, if it hasn’t already occurred, adding the epel-release yum repository, and then using YUM to install the application. I didn’t make any changes from the default installation. For my purposes, I didn’t need to enable HTTPS or further secure it. This may be something worth considering.

Install Telegraf

Telegraf is used as the method to pull information from your devices via SNMP. Similar to InfluxDB, I used the online documentation to install Telegraf:

[root@server ~]# yum install telegraf
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: centos.sonn.com
 * extras: centos-distro.cavecreek.net
 * updates: distro.ibiblio.org
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package telegraf.x86_64 0:1.5.3-1 will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
...
Installed:
  telegraf.x86_64 0:1.5.3-1                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Complete!

One thing not mentioned or shown, which I had to do, was configure Telegraf to start on boot:

[root@server ~]# systemctl enable grafana-server.service
Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/grafana-server.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/grafana-server.service.
[root@server ~]#

In addition, you will also need to install some useful SNMP tools for your use:

[root@pobgrafana ~]# yum install net-snmp-devels net-snmp net-snmp-utils

With Telegraf installed, it is now time to configure it. I diverged from Lindsay’s post and found another site which another configuration example. It worked best for me which I will show further below.

The configuration files for Telegraf are found at /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d – it is necessary to have all of your configuration files end in .conf. The following is what I used my SNMP configuration:

[[inputs.snmp]]
  agents = [ "ip_address" ]
  version = 3

  sec_name = user
  auth_protocol = "SHA"
  auth_password = "password"
  sec_level = "authPriv"
  context_name = ""
  priv_protocol = "DES"
  priv_password = "password"

  interval = "60s"
  timeout = "10s"
  retries = 3

  [[inputs.snmp.field]]
    name = "hostname"
    oid = "RFC1213-MIB::sysName.0"
    is_tag = true

  [[inputs.snmp.table]]
    name = "snmp"
    inherit_tags = [ "hostname" ]
    oid = "IF-MIB::ifXTable"

    [[inputs.snmp.table.field]]
      name = "ifName"
      oid = "IF-MIB::ifName"
      is_tag = true

Within our environment, we use SNMPv3. The above configuration will pull interface statistics. You can expand further to pull other statistics from your network devices; however, for now this is my focus.

You can use the command telegraf --test --config /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/file.conf to test the configuration file. It will output the results to the screen.

Now, with the configuration file in place, you just need to restart the Telegraf service:

[root@server ~]# systemctl restart telegraf

Install Grafana

Installation of Grafana is straight forward using the online documentation:

[root@server telegraf.d]# yum install https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/grafana-releases/release/grafana-5.0.4-1.x86_64.rpm
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
grafana-5.0.4-1.x86_64.rpm                                                                                                                                        |  49 MB  00:00:49     
...
Installed:
  grafana.x86_64 0:5.0.4-1                                                                                                                                                               

Dependency Installed:
  fontconfig.x86_64 0:2.10.95-11.el7   fontpackages-filesystem.noarch 0:1.44-8.el7   libXfont.x86_64 0:1.5.2-1.el7   libfontenc.x86_64 0:1.1.3-3.el7   stix-fonts.noarch 0:1.1.0-5.el7  
  urw-fonts.noarch 0:2.4-16.el7        xorg-x11-font-utils.x86_64 1:7.5-20.el7      

Complete!

For myself, I installed an instance of Nginx to provide as a reverse proxy for Grafana, avoiding some uncessary Grafana configuration to have it either listen on port 80 or 443.

Updated: