Grafana on InfluxCloud

Grafana is an open source time series data visualization tool.

The Grafana Add-On offers multi-tenant support as well as alerting capabilities. It allows the InfluxCloud administrator to provide a full Grafana experience to different sets of users and groups from a single node on InfluxCloud.

For pricing information, see the Pricing Page.

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Note: InfluxData offers Grafana as an alternative visualization tool for InfluxCloud.

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To purchase a Grafana add-on:

1. Click the Grafana box from the InfluxCloud subscription management page.

2. In the window that appears, select either a monthly or yearly plan.

3. Click Buy Grafana to be charged the amount shown. Note: There are no free trials for Grafana. Even if you are using an InfluxCloud free trial, you will be charged the displayed fee when you purchase the add-on.

4. The Grafana icon now appears in the subscription management page.
   Click the Grafana icon to open a window with details of your add-on, including the full URL:

Once the Grafana icon appears along with the Launch and Configure buttons (shown below), you are ready to get started.

Click here – if you want to explore the more advanced configuration options before diving into building dashboards.

Getting started with your Grafana add-on

Step One: Complete the Configuration

• To access additional configurations for your Grafana add-on, click the Configure button under the Grafana add-on box on the InfluxCloud subscription management page.
  • The dropdown options in the window that appear correspond to the different sections in Grafana’s configuration file.
  • The Root URL field MUST BE SET to the URL for your Grafana instance that is displayed when you access the Grafana details from the subscription itself. Example: https://goldiewilson-b2c5ae28.influxcloud.net
  • Add your URL and hit the Save Button. This will restart the Grafana instance with this new configuration parameter.

Step Two: Access Grafana

Access Grafana from the Add-ons section of your InfluxCloud subscription management page by clicking the Launch button.

Step Three: Sign in to Grafana

By default, Grafana creates a user with the username admin and password admin. Use these credentials to sign into Grafana.

Note: We recommend updating the password for the Grafana admin user as soon as possible. You can also change the admin email address and username which will be default values as well. You can change this by first selecting the Server Admin menu option under the the Gear icon in the left-hand navigation panel from within Grafana.

Then click on the shield icon to access the Grafana Admin details.

This information is sent out with the email invitations when you invite new users to access your instance.

Step Four: Add your data source

1. In Grafana, click Add data source from the Home Dashboard page.

2. Fill out the form like the example shown below. Enter your InfluxCloud hostname in the Url section and the db admin username and password that you used to create your subscription during the sign-up process into the User section.

3. Click Save & Test button. If Grafana can’t connect to your InfluxCloud subscription, double-check that your Url setting includes https:// and port 8086.

Once the green success message appears, you’re all set to begin creating Grafana graphs and dashboards using the data from your InfluxCloud subscription.

Step Five: Create your first dashboard

1. Click the Grafana icon to open the left side menu, then select Dashboards > New.

2. Click the gear icon at the top of your screen and select Settings.

3. Enter a name for your dashboard. In this example, we’ll call it CPU Usage.

4. Click the disk icon in the top menu bar to save.

Step Six: Create your first graph panel

1. Open a new graph panel by hovering over the three dots on the left of your screen and selecting Add Panel.

2. Select Graph to create a new graph.

3. To edit the graph, click Panel Title and select Edit.

4. Click the blue A to access Grafana’s Query Editor.

5. Edit the content in the FROM, SELECT, and GROUP BY sections. For this example, our query will calculate the average idle CPU usage at one minute intervals for each CPU core and the total CPU data in the measurement cpu. The above example also makes use of Grafana’s template variable $timeFilter. $timeFilter allows you to easily switch the query’s time range by clicking on the dropdown in the top right corner:

6. Click the General tab in the query editor and enter a name for your graph, such as CPU Usage Idle.

7. Save your dashboard.

You’re now equipped to use Grafana to examine and visualize the data stored in your InfluxCloud subscription.

Additional information and resources

• For more on administration in Grafana, see Grafana’s Administration documentation.
• For how to visualize data with Grafana, see Grafana’s InfluxDB documentation.