Day 76 - Build a Grafana Dashboard

Welcome to Day 76 of the #90DaysOfDevOps challenge! 🎉 Today, we will be building a Grafana dashboard to visualize your metrics. Grafana is a powerful tool that allows you to create customizable dashboards and track your metrics through different visualizations.

Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Grafana Dashboard

Let's get started! Follow the steps below to create your Grafana dashboard on AWS. 🚀

Step 1: Set Up Grafana on AWS 🌐

1. Launch an EC2 Instance:

   • Go to the AWS Management Console. 📜

   • Navigate to EC2 and click Launch Instance. ��

   • 

     Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). For simplicity, select the Amazon Linux 2 AMI. 🐧

   • Choose an instance type (t2.micro is sufficient for this tutorial). 💻

   • Configure instance details, add storage, add tags, and configure the security group to allow inbound traffic on ports 3000 (Grafana) and 22 (SSH). 🔒

     

   • Review and launch the instance. 🛠️

2. Install Grafana:

   • SSH into your EC2 instance using the key pair you created during launch. 🔑

   • Update your package list and install Grafana:

       sudo apt-get update
       sudo apt install -y software-properties-common
       sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main"
       wget -q -O - https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
       sudo apt update
       sudo apt install -y grafana
       sudo systemctl start grafana-server
       sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
     

   • Open your browser and navigate to http://<your-ec2-public-ip>:3000. 🌍

     

   • Log in with the default username admin and password admin. You'll be prompted to change the password. 🔐

     

Step 2: Create a Dashboard 📊

1. Add a New Dashboard:

   • In the Grafana sidebar, hover over the Create (plus sign) icon and click Dashboard. ➕

     

   • Click Add a new panel. 🖼️

2. Configure the Panel:

   • In the Query editor below the graph, enter the following query and press Shift + Enter:

       sum(rate(tns_request_duration_seconds_count[5m])) by(route)
     

   • In the Legend field, enter {{route}} to rename the time series in the legend. The graph legend updates when you click outside the field. 📝

     

     

     

3. Customize the Panel:

   • In the Panel editor on the right, under Settings, change the panel title to “Traffic”. 🚦

   • Click Apply in the top-right corner to save the panel and go back to the dashboard view. 💾

4. Save the Dashboard:

   • Click the Save dashboard (disk) icon at the top of the dashboard. 💾

   • Enter a name in the Dashboard name field and then click Save. 📝

Step 3: Share Your Dashboard 🌍

• Once you've created your dashboard, share it with the community! 📤

• You can export your dashboard by clicking the Share button at the top of the dashboard and selecting Export. Share the JSON file or a link to your Grafana instance. 🔗

  

Summary 📜

Today, you learned how to:

1. Set up Grafana on an AWS EC2 instance. 🖥️

2. Create a new dashboard and add a panel. 📊

3. Configure a query and customize your panel. 🛠️

4. Save and share your dashboard with the community. 🌐

Building dashboards in Grafana allows you to visualize your metrics effectively and keep track of important data at a glance. Keep experimenting with different queries and visualizations to create more insightful dashboards. 💡

If you have any questions, refer to the Grafana documentation for more details. 📚

Happy visualizing! 🎨👩‍💻👨‍💻