How To Install Grafana

Step 1: Create an IAM Role and Policy

• Go to IAM

• Create Policy

• Insert the policy below into the JSON

{
   "Version": "2012-10-17",
   "Statement": [
       {
           "Sid": "AllowReadingMetricsFromCloudWatch",
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Action": [
               "cloudwatch:ListMetrics",
               "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics",
               "cloudwatch:GetMetricData"
           ],
           "Resource": "*"
       },
       {
           "Sid": "AllowReadingTagsInstancesRegionsFromEC2",
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Action": [
               "ec2:DescribeTags",
               "ec2:DescribeInstances",
               "ec2:DescribeRegions"
           ],
           "Resource": "*"
       }
   ]
}

• Create Role

• EC2

• Choose Grafana policy

• Name it and Create a Role

Step 2: Create a Security Group

• Our Security Group will need ports 22, 80, and 3000 open, Port 3000 is for Grafana

• Go to Security Groups

• Add Port 22, 80, and 3000 for our inbound rules pointing to all CIDR ranges.

Step 3: Create EC2 Instance

• Go to EC2

• Create EC2

• Choose a public subnet

• Give it our Grafana security group

• Now SSH into our instance

Update your packages with

sudo yum update -y

Install Git

• To start you will need to update your server and then install git.

sudo yum install git -y

• Clone this repo from grafana, and change the directory into tutorial-environment.

• We need to add a repository for grafana so our OS will know where it is.

sudo nano /etc/yum.repos.d/grafana.repo

Add the text below to the repo file. This will install the open-source Grafana.

[grafana]
name=grafana
baseurl=https://packages.grafana.com/oss/rpm
repo_gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key
sslverify=1
sslcacert=/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt

Step 4: Install Grafana

• Now we will install Grafana. If you wish to actually test Grafana skip to Section Two below before you install.

sudo yum install grafana -y

• The next command will reload the system

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

• Then we will start our server and check our service with the following two commands.

sudo systemctl start grafana-server
sudo systemctl status grafana-server

• Our final command will ensure that Grafana will start up automatically if we stop and restart our instance.

sudo systemctl enable grafana-server.service

Test Grafana

• To test our server we will need to grab the public IPv4 from AWS and add a :3000 at the end, ie. ec2-43-XXX-YYYY:3000, and insert it into our browser URL.

• This will bring you to a login screen and our Username and Password will be admin and admin.

• You will be prompted to create a new password.

Using Grafana

• Then we can access our application which is a Grafana News app, this app will allow us to make some API calls and generate some errors so we can see Grafana in action.

• Go to your AWS console, grab your public IP and enter it in the URL with 8081, like so 10.10.10.10:8081. If you get here and cannot access your website make sure you open it up on port 3000!

• Once in the Grafana news app enter a name and in the URL enter example.com. Then vote for the title in the top right.

• Now we need to actually get to the Grafana website, so we will need to grab our public IPv4 from the AWS console and add a :3000 at the end, ie. 10.90.80.10:3000, and insert it into our browser URL. This will bring you to a login screen and our Username and Password will be admin. You will be prompted to create a new password.