Grafana and InfluxDB quickstart on Ubuntu

May 4, 2016 andre 29 Comments

This quickstart assumes you know how to install Ubuntu and access it through a terminal (command line).

EDIT: There seems to be a bug with the latest stable version of Grafana (2.6) and running on a headless system such as the one I’m describing here (Ubuntu Server). This bug causes icons not to be displayed in the web interface. I would suggest either using Ubuntu Desktop (I have not tested this myself) or using Grafana 3 which does not have this bug (I tested this and it does work on Ubuntu Server 16.04. I’ve updated the Grafana installation instructions to include version 3 as well).

Ubuntu Configuration

I started with a new installation of Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS 64bit. During installation, when prompted for which predefined collections of software to install, only “standard system utilities” and “OpenSSH server” were selected.

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_install

After a clean installation, run:

sudo apt-get update

and

sudo apt-get upgrade

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_configure

Install InfluxDB

The instructions below are based on the official documentation which can be found here: https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v0.12/introduction/installation/

First, configure the package sources.

Make sure you’ve previously used sudo in the current session, so that the sudo in the command below does not prompt you for a password again. To make sure, you can just run “sudo ls” and check that it doesn’t prompt for a password.

If you copy and paste this, make sure it is three separate lines.

curl -sL https://repos.influxdata.com/influxdb.key | sudo apt-key add -
source /etc/lsb-release
echo "deb https://repos.influxdata.com/${DISTRIB_ID,,} ${DISTRIB_CODENAME} stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_influxdb1

This will create a file called “/etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list” if it worked.

Then install InfluxDB:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install influxdb

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_influxdb2

Start InfluxDB. This command produces no output.

sudo service influxdb start

Connect to InfluxDB using the commandline

influx

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_influxdb3

Create a database. For this quickstart we’ll call the database “statsdemo“. Run this command inside the InfluxDB shell.

CREATE DATABASE statsdemo

This command produces no output, but when you list the database, you should see that it was created:

SHOW DATABASES

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_influxdb4

Select the new created database:

USE statsdemo

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_influxdb5

Insert some test data using the following command.

INSERT cpu,host=serverA value=0.64

More information about inserting data can be found here: https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v0.12/guides/writing_data/

The insert command does not produce any output, but you should see your data when you perform a query:

SELECT * from cpu

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_influxdb6

Type “exit” to leave the InfluxDB shell and return to the Linux shell.

exit

Writing test data

To have some data to play with we need to write something to the database.

Open another terminal and run this one line script. It will continue running until you press CTRL-C and write the current load average of your Ubuntu server every 5 seconds to the database, using the HTTP API of InfluxDB.

curl -i -XPOST 'http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo' --data-binary 'cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d" "`'

It will print out something every 5 seconds. Just let it run and collect some data while you do the next steps.

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_data

You can verify if data is being sent to InfluxDB by using the influx shell and running a query. Note that if your server is not very busy, you’ll see a lot of zeros being logged for the load average!

influx
USE statsdemo
SELECT * FROM cpu

Install Grafana

The instructions below are based on the official documentation, available here: http://docs.grafana.org/installation/debian/

Configure package sources. You can either install the latest stable version (2.6 currently), or the Beta/Testing version (3.0 beta currently).

Due to a bug with 2.6 and Ubuntu 16.04 Server, I recommend using the beta version if you’re using Ubuntu Server in a headless configuration (No X).

For the current Stable version (2.6), use:

echo "deb https://packagecloud.io/grafana/stable/debian/ wheezy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
curl https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

For the beta version (3.0) use:

echo "deb https://packagecloud.io/grafana/testing/debian/ wheezy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
curl https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_grafana1

Update package repositories and install Grafana:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install grafana

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_grafana2

Start the grafana server:

sudo service grafana-server start

Configure Grafana

These instructions are for Grafana 2.6, but if you installed the beta version it is very similar.

Then use a webbrowser to connect to grafana, using the hostname or IP of your Ubuntu server and port 3000. Log in with admin/admin:

http://statsdemo:3000/

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_grafana3

After logging in. click on Data Sources in the left menu, and then on Add New in the top menu to add a new datasource.

Choose the following options and click Add. Note: If you’re using Grafana 3.0, the Type will just be “InfluxDB”

Name: statsdemo
Type: InfluxDB 0.9.x
Url: http://localhost:8086/
Database: statsdemo
User: admin
Password: admin

After adding the datasource you will get a Test Connection button at the bottom, which you can use to verify if your settings are correct.

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_grafana4

Create a Dashboard

Click on the Dashboards link in the left menu, then the Home menu in the top to get a list of dashboards. Click the New button at the bottom to create a new dashboard.

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_grafana5

You will get a page with a green rectangle which expands if you hover your mouse cursor over it. If you click it it opens a submenu. Select Add Panel -> Graph from this menu.

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_grafana6

A sample panel with a graph will appear. With Metrics selected (it should be selected by default), there is a dropdown where you can choose a datasource. Choose statsdemo. A query will be displayed. Click on ‘select measurement’ to choose a measurement from the database. In this case the only one there is the sample data we inserted, called cpu.

As soon as you select the measurement Grafana will pull the data from InfluxDB and update the graph.

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_grafana7

Go to the General tab, and give the panel a better name, for example “CPU Load Average”, and then save the dashboard by clicking on the Save Dashboard icon next to “New dashboard”. (Note there’s a bug in my installation, and the icon does not display, however, if I hover the mouse icon there I get a tooltip saying ‘Save Dashboard).

grafana_influxdb_ubuntu_grafana8

That’s it for now. This dashboard will continue updating as new data is written to InfluxDB.

29 thoughts on “Grafana and InfluxDB quickstart on Ubuntu”

James says:

May 18, 2016 at 12:17 am

You have a typo in your syntax to copy..

while true; do curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”; sleep 5; done

Reply
Matthew White says:

August 4, 2016 at 4:43 pm

Great post! It was just what I was looking for.

I did have some trouble with single/double quote use in the pasted “Writing Test Data” script, though. Terminal whined about an “invalid boolean,” unable to parse. What’s in the console screenshot works, so I used that.

For other Terminally-challenged people, the code ends up being:

while true; do curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”; sleep 5; done

Reply
1. Alessandro Pocaterra says:
  
  August 21, 2019 at 10:20 am
  
  “`bash
  while true; do curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”; sleep 1; done
  “`
  
  Reply
  1. Alessandro Pocaterra says:
    
    August 21, 2019 at 10:22 am
    
    Please don’t consider this code: the publisher makes a ticks change and it is unusable 🙁
    
    Reply
David says:

September 25, 2016 at 9:24 pm

This worked for me:

while true; do curl -i -XPOST http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”; sleep 5; done

Reply
Anonymous says:

October 13, 2016 at 10:39 am

Is not working for me:

{“error”:”unable to parse ‘cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d\” \”`’: invalid boolean”}

InfluxDB shell version: 1.0.2

Reply
Celtian says:

October 13, 2016 at 10:40 am

Not working for me:

{“error”:”unable to parse ‘cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d\” \”`’: invalid boolean”}

InfluxDB shell version: 1.0.2

Reply
Roman says:

November 27, 2016 at 5:13 am

You need to replace this:
curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary ‘cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d” “`’

by this:
curl -i -XPOST “http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo” –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”

Because you can not run backtick inside singe quote: not ‘“’ but ““”

Screenshot is right, but text is wrong.

Reply
marso says:

March 22, 2017 at 12:15 pm

on ubuntu 16 here is what works :

while true ; do curl -iv -XPOST http://192.168.234.128:8086/write?db=statsdemo –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”; sleep 60; done

Reply
Hsan says:

April 11, 2017 at 1:02 am

curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary ‘cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d” “`’
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Content-Type: application/json
Request-Id: 63acdd7b-1e41-11e7-803f-000000000000
X-Influxdb-Version: 1.2.2
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2017 22:59:45 GMT
Content-Length: 108

{“error”:”unable to parse ‘cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d\” \”`’: invalid boolean”}

Please where is the problem?

Reply
1. Hsan says:
  
  April 11, 2017 at 1:31 am
  
  I use ubuntu 16.04.
  curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary ‘cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d” “`’
  HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
  Content-Type: application/json
  Request-Id: 63acdd7b-1e41-11e7-803f-000000000000
  X-Influxdb-Version: 1.2.2
  Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2017 22:59:45 GMT
  Content-Length: 108
  
  {“error”:”unable to parse ‘cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d\” \”`’: invalid boolean”}
  ________________________________________
  when I use this command :
  
  curl -i -XPOST “http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo” –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”
  
  cut: the delimiter must be a single character …
  
  Please where is the problem?
  
  Reply
hsanbouazizi93 says:

April 23, 2017 at 6:31 pm

Hi, I created a database based on influxdb then I installed grafana. I chose data source my database. But I can not get a graph in my dashboard.
can you help me

Reply
1. Sara Amani says:
  
  May 10, 2017 at 2:41 pm
  
  I have the exact same problem.
  
  Reply
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Anonymous says:

June 6, 2017 at 10:54 pm

The below scrpted worked for me:
while true; do curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”; sleep 5; done

If this doesn’t try manually typing it out from the screenshot above.

Reply
BE says:

June 13, 2017 at 4:29 am

This is better, no smart quotes.

while true; do curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary ‘cpu,host=serverA value=’`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d” “`; sleep 5; done

Reply
Anonymous says:

June 30, 2017 at 1:02 pm

while true; do curl -i -X POST –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`” “http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo”; sleep 5; done

Reply
AJ says:

July 27, 2017 at 2:07 pm

I am trying to plots graphs in Grafana and seeing below error :

Invalid interval string, expecting a number followed by one of “Mwdhmsy”.

Could you please help ?

Reply
raiderj says:

August 7, 2017 at 9:17 pm

Kind of a mess getting the influx dummy data in… here’s what worked for me:

”’
while true ; do curl -iv -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”; sleep 5; done
”’

Reply
John says:

January 12, 2018 at 1:21 am

Hi, I don’t get it yet :/

curl -i -XPOST http://localhost:8086/write?db=premium_stats –-data-binary “cpu,host=premium value=`cat /proc/loadavg | cut -f1 -d’ ‘`”

output;
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: –-data-binary
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: cpu,host=premium value=0.04

any help? 🙂

Reply
JanLewandowski says:

February 4, 2018 at 10:46 pm

…. value=`cat /dev/ttyUSB0 | cut -f1 d” “` – not act. Is it possible for DS18b20+ESP8266 ?

Reply
Anonymous says:

April 13, 2018 at 1:19 am

https://pastebin.com/BpKG6y7b (posted the code on pastebin)

Reply
1. Anonymous says:
  
  March 17, 2020 at 10:20 pm
  
  THANK YOU!!!
  
  Reply
nithinvg says:

September 23, 2018 at 12:09 am

while true ; do sudo curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=$(less /proc/loadavg | colrm 4)” ; sleep 5; done

Reply
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Damon Dawson says:

February 2, 2020 at 10:49 pm

I’m getting
:~$ while true ; do sudo curl -i -XPOST ‘http://localhost:8086/write?db=statsdemo’ –data-binary “cpu,host=serverA value=$(less /proc/loadavg | colrm 4)” ; sleep 5; done
curl: (1) Protocol “‘http” not supported or disabled in libcurl
curl: (3) Failed to convert –data-binary to ACE; string contains a disallowed character

curl: (3) Failed to convert “cpu,host=serverA to ACE; string contains a disallowed character

curl: (3) Failed to convert value=1.4” to ACE; string contains a disallowed character

curl: (1) Protocol “‘http” not supported or disabled in libcurl
curl: (3) Failed to convert –data-binary to ACE; string contains a disallowed character

curl: (3) Failed to convert “cpu,host=serverA to ACE; string contains a disallowed character

curl: (3) Failed to convert value=1.4” to ACE; string contains a disallowed character

curl: (1) Protocol “‘http” not supported or disabled in libcurl
curl: (3) Failed to convert –data-binary to ACE; string contains a disallowed character

curl: (3) Failed to convert “cpu,host=serverA to ACE; string contains a disallowed character

curl: (3) Failed to convert value=1.4” to ACE; string contains a disallowed character

Any ideas?

Reply
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