Depending on the type of implementation that you want to use, you will need some of the following requirements:

• A Raspberry Pi: version 2, 3, or 4 will work. However, depending on the size of your solution, you will have to size your hardware according to it.
• If you prefer to use an Ubuntu Server or a Docker implementation, then you will need a virtual machine, either local or in the cloud. The resources of the virtual machine will have to adapt to your system needs.

Managing data

Grafana allows to capture and manage data from many different sources, such as relational databases, time-series databases, NoSQL databases, Excel or CSV files, logs, and many others.

In this way, Grafana can be connected to different data sources, isolating the visualization and analytics app from the databases. All databases are independent and can be managed by the corresponding applications.

So, even if the database is managed by another department, read-only access can be granted to Grafana to perform analytics on that data.

With the release of Grafana 8.x, it is possible to feed live events into Grafana using MQTT, HTTP, or other streaming data sources. This is a great new feature for IoT systems.

Performing visualizations

Grafana allows you to build a broad range of dashboards, from the typical time-series plot to advanced visualizations.

The dashboards are made up of panels, which provide different types of visualizations.

Some of the possible visualization panels are as follows:

• Time-series plots
• Statistical graphs
• Categorical or boolean panels
• Text and logs
• Topological views
• Geographical or georeferenced data

Every dashboard can be easily modified through drag and drop and resize operations.

Dashboards can be shared with specific users or teams, allowing the data to be used in a cooperative way. Also, dashboards can be published on a website to make information available to the public.

Transformations, alerts, and annotations

With Grafana, you can perform transformations directly on the visualization panels. For instance, you can summarize, combine, rename, and make calculations just with a few clicks.

With Grafana, you can create, modify, and silence all the alert conditions in a centralized way. This functionality simplifies the management of alerts.

Finally, with annotations, you can make comments on data directly on the visualization panels. You can include descriptions and tags for every event of interest.

Now that you have learned about the capabilities of Grafana and the reasons that lead to its use in IoT systems, in the following sections, you will learn how to install Grafana on Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu Server, and Docker.

The Single Board Computer (SBC) Raspberry Pi has been widely adopted for many uses, including IoT. So, it is quite natural to try to use Grafana on it.

In this section, we will see how to install and configure Grafana on a Raspberry Pi. To achieve good performance, we will use a Raspberry Pi version 2 or later.

Installation instructions

All the following instructions assume that you are using Raspberry Pi OS as the operating system.

Let’s start:

1. First, it is always recommended to start with an update.

So, we run the following:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

2. After that, we need to download the binary files for the installation:

   $ wget https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana-rpi_8.0.6_armhf.deb
   $ sudo dpkg -i grafana-rpi_8.0.6_armhf.deb

   Note about Versions

   Change the package version to the most recent stable version available. You can find all the available options at https://grafana.com/grafana/download?edition=oss.

3. The next step is to make Grafana start at boot. To do this, we can use the systemd service file, included in Grafana packages.

So, we enable it by running the following:

 $ sudo systemctl enable grafana-server

And that’s it. Grafana will start at every boot.

4. Now, to start Grafana manually, we can use the following:

   $ sudo systemctl start grafana-server

Now that you know how to install Grafana on a Raspberry Pi, let’s dive into how you can access Grafana for the first time.

Accessing Grafana for the first time

Now that you have Grafana running in your Raspberry Pi, you can access it through any web browser, pointing it to http://your-raspberry-ip-address:3000.

You can use your Raspberry Pi IP address, as well as its DNS name. Or, if you are accessing Grafana from the Raspberry Pi itself, you can use localhost or 127.0.0.1 in the URL.

After you access the web interface, you will have to enter the username and password to enter the platform.

The default credentials are user = admin and password = admin.

Figure 1.1 – Grafana login page

In this section, you have learned to install Grafana on a Raspberry Pi. In the next section, you will see how to do it on Ubuntu Server.

Ubuntu is one of the most popular operating systems for servers, so we will learn how to install Grafana on it.

Installing Grafana on Ubuntu is a very straightforward procedure because there are Ubuntu packages.

Installation instructions

Let’s look at what we need to do here:

1. As before, we first run updates:

   $ sudo apt-get update 
   $ sudo apt-get upgrade

2. Next, if you do not have wget installed on your server, you can install it as follows:

   $ sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
   $ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common wget

3. Then you can use wget to download the GPG key and add it to the APT keys. In this way, you authorize Grafana packages to be installed on the system:

   $ wget -q -O - https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add –

4. After that, you can add the Grafana repository (stable release) to the APT source list:

   $ echo "deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list

5. Finally, run the following commands:

   $ sudo apt-get update
   $ sudo apt-get install grafana

Now that you have installed Grafana on Ubuntu Server, let’s see how to run it.

Running Grafana on Ubuntu Server

There are two ways of running Grafana as a service. Let’s have a look at them.

Running Grafana using systemd

Grafana services can be managed by systemd.

To start Grafana, simply execute the following:

$ sudo systemctl start grafana-server

To see the Grafana service status, run this command:

$ sudo systemctl status grafana-server

To stop the service, use this command:

$ sudo systemctl stop grafana-server

And to enable start at boot, use this command:

$ sudo systemctl enable grafana-server.service

Now that you know how to do it with systemd, let’s see how to do it with initd.

Running Grafana with initd

You can run Grafana as follows:

$ sudo service grafana-server start

To stop Grafana, use this command:

$ sudo service grafana-server stop

To get the service status, run this command:

$ sudo service grafana-server status

To configure it to start at boot, use the following command:

$ sudo update-rc.d grafana-server defaults

You have now installed and executed Grafana on Ubuntu Server. You also configured it to start on boot. Now let’s see how to access Grafana from a browser.

Accessing Grafana

Before trying to access Grafana, make sure that the service is running. You can check it using the preceding commands. If it is stopped, you must start it as shown earlier.

As soon as you have Grafana installed and running, you can access it by pointing the browser to http://your-server-ip-or-name:3000.

The default credentials are admin/admin.

Now that you have learned how to install and run Grafana on Ubuntu Server as well as how to manage start-up at boot using two different methods, let’s move on to the next section, where you will learn how to deploy Grafana using Docker.