Skip to content

Setting up a server with InfluxDB and Grafana

Jump to bottom
Todd Radel edited this page May 9, 2018 · 3 revisions

Provisioning a new server

⚠️ Warning
Do not install InfluxDB and Grafana on the same servers that are already running Vault or Consul. Set them up on a new server instead.

Recommended hardware specs for running InfluxDB and Grafana depend on whether you have a single Vault/Consul cluster, or multiple clusters that will be sending metrics to InfluxDB:

Single Cluster Multiple Clusters
CPU cores 2 to 4 4 to 8
RAM 2 GB to 4 GB 8 GB
IOPS 300 1000
AWS instance type t2.medium t2.large or m4.large
GCP instance type n1-standard-1 n1-standard-2

InfluxDB and Grafana can run on most flavors of Linux. Windows is not recommended.

Installing InfluxDB

Instructions can be found on the InfluxDB web site. Brief instructions for Ubuntu Server are reproduced here.

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

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install influxdb
sudo systemctl enable influxdb
sudo systemctl start influxdb

Installing Grafana

Grafana also has pretty comprehensive install guides available, but again we present simple instructions for installing on Ubuntu servers:

curl -sL https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://packagecloud.io/grafana/stable/debian/ jessie main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
apt-get update && apt-get -y install grafana

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install grafana
systemctl enable grafana-server
systemctl restart grafana-server

Securing the installation

By default, InfluxDB listens on port 8086 with no authentication. Once you have monitoring up and running as described in this guide, you will probably want to take steps to secure your InfluxDB installation:

  • Restricting access via firewall or AWS security groups
  • Configuring InfluxDB for HTTPS
  • Enabling authentication

Don't forget to update telegraf.conf with the appropriate options too.

Next up: Installing and configuring Telegraf agents on each of your Vault and Consul hosts.

This page is part of the Vault and Consul monitoring guide.

Clone this wiki locally