Grafana

Grafana is an open-source, general purpose dashboarding tool, which runs as a web application. It can be used to create a variety of time-series graphs and also for displaying logs. It supports Prometheus, graphite, InfluxDB, opentsdb, Grafana Loki, PostgreSQL and many other data sources.

See Grafana options

Installation

Grafana is available as NixOS module, it can be enabled using the following config:

services.grafana = {
  enable = true;
  settings = {
    server = {
      # Listening Address
      http_addr = "127.0.0.1";
      # and Port
      http_port = 3000;
      # Grafana needs to know on which domain and URL it's running
      domain = "your.domain";
      root_url = "https://your.domain/grafana/"; # Not needed if it is `https://your.domain/`
      serve_from_sub_path = true;
    };
  };
};

This will make Grafana available only at localhost. On a server, it might be used through SSH tunnel or made publicly available using nginx with TLS. For example the follwing Nginx configuration can be used:

services.nginx.virtualHosts."your.domain" = {
  addSSL = true;
  enableACME = true;
  locations."/grafana/" = {
      proxyPass = "http://${toString config.services.grafana.settings.server.http_addr}:${toString config.services.grafana.settings.server.http_port}";
      proxyWebsockets = true;
      recommendedProxySettings = true;
  };
};

Configuration

Everything else (data sources, users, dashboards, ...) can be configured either in the Web UI, or as code.

Via Web UI

Log into the Grafana web application (using default user: admin, password: admin). Refer to the official documentation on how to do it:

• Add a data source
• Add a user
• Create dashboard

Declarative configuration

services.grafana = {
  enable = true;

  declarativePlugins = with pkgs.grafanaPlugins; [ ... ];

  provision = {
    enable = true;

    dashboards.settings.providers = [{
      name = "my dashboards";
      options.path = "/etc/grafana-dashboards";
    }];

    datasources.settings.datasources = [
      # "Built-in" datasources can be provisioned https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/administration/provisioning/#data-sources
      {
        name = "Prometheus";
        type = "prometheus";
        url = "${config.services.prometheus.listenAddress}:${toString config.services.prometheus.port}";
      }
      # Some plugins also can https://grafana.com/docs/plugins/yesoreyeram-infinity-datasource/latest/setup/provisioning/
      {
        name = "Infinity";
        type = "yesoreyeram-infinity-datasource";
      }
      # But not all, c.f. https://github.com/fr-ser/grafana-sqlite-datasource/issues/141
    ];

    # Note: removing attributes from the above `datasources.settings.datasources` is not enough for them to be deleted on `grafana`;
    # One needs to use the following option:
    # datasources.settings.deleteDatasources = [ { name = "foo"; orgId = 1; } { name = "bar"; orgId = 1; } ];
  };
};

environment.etc = [{
  source = ./. + "/grafana-dashboards/some-dashboard.json";
  group = "grafana";
  user = "grafana";
}];

External Links

• wiki.archlinux.org/Grafana
• grafana.com
• How to Setup Prometheus, Grafana and Loki on NixOS