README.md

Grafana on Raspberry Pi 4

Grafana is a monitoring/analytics web interface. This manual documents how to build and run Grafana on Pi 4.

Prerequisites:

• Node exporter running on all nodes (calculates metrics locally)
• Prometheus running on one of the nodes (aggregates and stores all metrics in one place)

Citations:

• This section is based on the officail grafana doc

Create directories

sudo adduser --disabled-password grafana
sudo mkdir /mnt/btrfs/grafana
sudo mkdir /mnt/btrfs/grafana/src
sudo mkdir /mnt/btrfs/grafana/gocode
sudo mkdir /mnt/btrfs/grafana/bin

sudo chown -R grafana /mnt/btrfs/grafana

Setup firefall

https://github.com/alevchuk/minibank#network

Install needed packages

sudo apt install -y python3 python3-distutils g++ make golang git

Link to Go

1. Enable Go. Add exports to ~/.profile by running:

sudo su -l grafana

ln -s /mnt/btrfs/grafana/src ~/src
ln -s /mnt/btrfs/grafana/gocode ~/gocode
ln -s /mnt/btrfs/grafana/bin ~/bin
ln -s /mnt/btrfs/lightning/src/ ~/src_readonly

echo 'export GOROOT=~/src_readonly/go' >> ~/.profile
echo 'export GOPATH=~/gocode' >> ~/.profile
echo 'export PATH=$GOROOT/bin:$GOPATH/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile
echo 'export PATH=$HOME/bin/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile

Load new profile

. ~/.profile

Build Node.js

node.js (includes NPM)

• unfortunatly, the make step here will take many hours (a whole day)
  • installing node.js some other way maybe possible yet comes with other issues (e.g. the official debian build is out-dated, likely incompatible and has security vulnerabilities)

Login as grafana user:

sudo su -l grafana

rm -rf /mnt/btrfs/grafana/bin/lib/node_modules  # clear previous install

git clone https://github.com/nodejs/node.git ~/src/node
cd ~/src/node
git checkout $(git tag | grep v21 | sort -V | tail -n1)

cd ~/src/node && make clean && ./configure --prefix $HOME/bin && make && make install

Install yarn

sudo su -l grafana

npm was installed as part of Node.js so you can just do this

npm install -g yarn
yarn set version stable

Install grafana

sudo su -l grafana

git clone https://github.com/grafana/grafana.git ~/src/grafana

Build Grafana front-end

cd ~/src/grafana

v=$(git tag | grep v9 | sort -V | tail -n1)
echo $v
git checkout $v

yarn install --immutable   # this will take ~15 minutes
yarn start   # this will build front-end assets

Build Grafana back-end

sudo su -l grafana

cd ~/src/grafana
make run

Run

cd ~/gocode/src/github.com/grafana/grafana
./bin/grafana-server

Punch a hole in the firewall

sudo vi /etc/iptables/rules.v4

Add rule (modify -s if your subnet is different):

# Allow Grafana Web UI on local network
-A INPUT -p tcp -s 192.168.0.0/24 --dport 3000 -j ACCEPT

Reload firewall:

sudo systemctl restart netfilter-persistent.service

Use

Use grafana: connect your browser to http://localhost:3000

Follow web-ui wizard. Import dashboards:

• Node Exporter Server Metrics dashboard https://gist.github.com/alevchuk/2a28d484945c86d3ffef0f7e671b065d
• Bitcoin dashboard https://gist.github.com/alevchuk/4235aefb3b8389b62c75878f5b1f7d04

E.g. "Node Exporter Server Metrics" can show multiple nodes side-by-side:

Configure Hostnames