Installing Graphite and Grafana on RHEL 6, 7, or Ubuntu in under 30 minutes
The open source metrics software Graphite is brilliant. To get it up and running however is not so. The ‘official’ documentation is quite generic, and the packaged versions (on EPEL and via PIP) have their own issues on some Linux flavors. So I usually end up searching Google to hopefully find a working recipe for the Linux flavor of the day on someone’s blog. And when I’ve done that invariably it still doesn’t work. A bit more googling and hacking and some minutes or hours later depending on my luck then ta-da, SUCCESS!
Could I do it again with the minimum steps possible? Not a chance. Then ask me to do it without internet access (so passing install files via a jumphost) and it turns into a multi-hour or multi-day adventure.
Faced with this problem, and a desire to get Graphite and Grafana up and running quickly, I wrote an installation document for the following common scenarios:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.6 (internet connected or via jumphost)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.1 (internet connected or via jumphost)
Ubuntu 14.04 (internet connected)
So you can pick a totally free option (Ubuntu), or go with an enterprise option that will hopefully fit your corporate standards (RHEL). And if you have no internet access (often the case from a management network) we also have steps for an offline install on RHEL.
From a fresh OS image you can be up and running in under 30 min with only copy/paste skills required.
Once you’re up, if you’re a NetApp shop you can configure metrics from the OnCommand Performance Manager (OPM) external data provider feature, or the NetApp Harvest collector coming to the Support ToolChest soon.
Or if you’re not a NetApp shop, be happy that you have your metrics platform up and running and can start monitoring with something like collectd
The instructions are downloadable here, no login required:
Quick Start: Installing Graphite and Grafana
Comments are always welcome!