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Step 7: Choose a Grafana dashboard (optional)

Choose local or cloud Grafana​

You have a choice of running Grafana locally, by including grafana.yml, or in the cloud, with grafana-cloud.yml. If you choose Grafana Cloud, you must edit prometheus/custom-prom.yml and add your cloud remote write credentials. Please see prometheus/custom-prom.yml.sample for the syntax of that addition.

grafana-cloud.yml runs a local Prometheus but no local Grafana, and enables adding custom Prometheus config items. Its contents are merged with the pre-provisioned configuration.

If you want to add additional scrape targets, place these into prometheus/conf.d.

Local Grafana dashboards​

A baseline set of dashboards has been included.

You can additional dashboards from the Grafana repository, for example 11133 as a node exporter dashboard. You can also import dashboards by their JSON, as you see fit.

Connecting to local Grafana​

Connect to https://grafana.yourdomain.com/ (or http://YOURSERVERIP:3000/ if not using the reverse proxy), log in as admin/admin, and set a new password.

If you run Grafana over http without encryption, do not expose the Grafana port to the Internet. You can use SSH tunneling to reach Grafana securely over the Internet.

In order to load other Dashboards, follow these instructions.

  • Click on the + icon on the left, choose "Import".
  • Copy/paste JSON code from the Raw github page of the Dashboard you chose - click anywhere inside the page, use Ctrl-A to select all and Ctrl-C to copy
  • Click "Load"
  • If prompted for a data source choose the "prometheus" data source
  • Click "Import".

Alerting with Grafana​

Grafana supports setting up alerts and sending notifications to email, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, etc. Some alerts are pre-previsioned.

To receive these alerts, use the alert bell icon on the left-hand side and set up contact points and notification policies. The pre-provisioned alerts use a severity label. You could for example send medium severity alerts to email, Discord or Telegram, and critical severity alerts to PagerDuty or OpsGenie.