Learn how to – How To Install Grafana on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8

Learn how to – How To Install Grafana on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8.

How can I install Grafana on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8?. This guide will walk you through the installation of Grafana on RHEL / CentOS 8. Grafana is a free and open source feature-rich graph editor & metrics dashboard for various data sources such as Elasticsearch, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, and InfluxDB.

We have other installation guides for Grafana, choose one for your Linux distribution.

• How to Install Grafana on Ubuntu and Debian
• Install Grafana and InfluxDB on CentOS 7

Install Grafana on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8

Grafana can be installed on RHEL / CentOS 8 from YUM repository or by manually downloading and installing .rpm package. The former is preferred method since it is easy to update and uninstall Grafana with the yum package manager.

Some new features in Grafana are:

• Library panels: Allow users to build panels that can be used in multiple dashboards
• Prometheus metrics browser: Allows you to quickly find metrics and select relevant labels to build basic queries.
• Grafana v8.0 alerts: Centralizes alerting information for Grafana managed alerts and alerts from Prometheus-compatible data sources in one UI and API.
• Real-time streaming: Data sources can now send real-time updates to dashboards over a websocket connection
• Bar chart visualization: A new visualization that supports categorical data
• Histogram visualization: This hidden feature of the old Graph panel is now a standalone visualization
• State timeline visualization: The State timeline visualization shows discrete state changes over time
• Time series visualization out of Beta and is now graduating to a stable state
• Download logs: When you inspect a panel, you can now download log results as a text (.txt) file.

Step 1: Add Grafana 8 YUM repository

Run the commands below as user with sudo privileges or as root user to add repository content.

cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/grafana.repo
[grafana]
name=grafana
baseurl=https://packages.grafana.com/oss/rpm
repo_gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key
sslverify=1
sslcacert=/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
EOF

You can optionally update you cache index for available packages:

sudo dnf makecache

Step 2: Install Grafana 8 on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8

When repository for Grafana has been configured, Grafana can be easily installed by running the commands below:

sudo dnf -y install grafana

Package info:

$ rpm -qi grafana
Name        : grafana
Version     : 9.2.1
Release     : 1
Architecture: x86_64
Install Date: Tue 18 Oct 2022 11:23:56 PM EAT
Group       : default
Size        : 322328242
License     : AGPLv3
Signature   : RSA/SHA512, Tue 18 Oct 2022 12:14:55 PM EAT, Key ID 8c8c34c524098cb6
Source RPM  : grafana-9.2.1-1.src.rpm
Build Date  : Tue 18 Oct 2022 12:14:11 PM EAT
Build Host  : 0abca8bd37cf
Relocations : /
Packager    : contact@grafana.com
Vendor      : Grafana
URL         : https://grafana.com
Summary     : Grafana
....

Step 3: Start Grafana Service

Grafana service is managed by systemd. Start the service and enable it to start on boot.

$ sudo systemctl enable --now grafana-server.service 
 Synchronizing state of grafana-server.service with SysV service script with /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install.
 Executing: /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install enable grafana-server
 Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/grafana-server.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/grafana-server.service.

The default port used is 3000. If you have another process using this port, you’ll need to set custom port in Grafana configuration file /etc/grafana/grafana.ini.

http_port = 3000

Your grafana-server service should show running state.

$ systemctl status grafana-server.service 
 ● grafana-server.service - Grafana instance
    Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/grafana-server.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
    Active: active (running)  since Tue 2022-10-18 23:24:21 EAT; 4s ago
      Docs: http://docs.grafana.org
  Main PID: 2974 (grafana-server)
     Tasks: 9 (limit: 11510)
    Memory: 17.3M
    CGroup: /system.slice/grafana-server.service
            └─2974 /usr/sbin/grafana-server --config=/etc/grafana/grafana.ini --pidfile=/var/run/grafana/grafana-server.pid --packaging=rpm cfg:default>
 Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing CleanUpService" logger=server
 Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing NotificationService" logger=server
 Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing ProvisioningService" logger=server
 Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing PluginManager" logger=server
 Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Starting plugin search" logger=plugins
Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Plugin dir created" logger=plugins dir=/var/lib/grafana/plu>
 Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing TracingService" logger=server
 Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing Stream Manager"
 Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="HTTP Server Listen" logger=http.server address=0.0.0.0:3000>
 Oct 18 23:24:21 rhel8.local systemd[1]: Started Grafana instance.

By default, Grafana will write logs to /var/log/grafana directory and its SQLite database is located under /var/lib/grafana/grafana.db

Step 4: Open firewall port for Grafana

If you have a running firewalld service, allow port 3000for access to the dashboard from the network:

sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=3000/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Step 5: Access Grafana Dashboard

Grafana web dashboard is accessible on http://[Server IP|Hostname]:3000

The default logins are:

username: admin
Password: admin

Change admin password in the next window.

Now that you have Grafana installed in your RHEL 8 server, you can check our monitoring guides:

• Monitoring Ceph Cluster with Prometheus and Grafana
• How to Monitor Linux Server Performance with Prometheus and Grafana in 5 minutes
• How to Monitor BIND DNS server with Prometheus and Grafana
• Monitoring MySQL / MariaDB with Prometheus in five minutes
• How to Monitor Redis Server with Prometheus and Grafana in 5 minutes
• How to Monitor Apache Web Server with Prometheus and Grafana in 5 minutes