Day 73 - Grafana: A Hands-On Guide to Setting Up Grafana on AWS EC2 🌟

If you’ve been following along with our Grafana series, you should now have a solid understanding of the basics—what Grafana is, why it’s used, and its incredible capabilities. Today, we’re diving into the practical side of things with a hands-on task: Setting up Grafana in a local environment on AWS EC2. Let’s explore the what, how, and why of this task in detail.

What is Grafana?

Grafana is an open-source platform for data visualization, monitoring, and observability. It lets you create customizable dashboards to visualize metrics from various data sources like Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and InfluxDB. It’s widely used for monitoring infrastructure, applications, and business processes.

Why Set Up Grafana Locally on AWS EC2?

1. Hands-On Experience: Setting up Grafana locally on EC2 gives you practical knowledge, bridging the gap between theory and real-world scenarios.

2. Scalability Testing: EC2 provides a scalable cloud environment to mimic real-world use cases.

3. Cost-Effective Learning: With AWS Free Tier, you can experiment with minimal costs.

4. Foundation for Advanced Use: Once you’ve mastered local setup, you can expand to integrate Grafana with multiple data sources or even set up clusters for high availability.

How to Set Up Grafana on AWS EC2

Follow these steps to get Grafana running on an EC2 instance:

Step 1: Launch an AWS EC2 Instance

1. Log in to your AWS Management Console.

2. Navigate to EC2 Dashboard.

3. Click Launch Instance and configure:

   • AMI: Choose Amazon Linux 2 or Ubuntu.

   • Instance Type: Select a free-tier eligible type, such as t2.micro.

   • Key Pair: Create or use an existing key pair for SSH access.

   • Security Group: Open ports 22 (SSH) and 3000 (Grafana default port).

4. Click Launch to start the instance.

Step 2: Connect to Your EC2 Instance

1. Open a terminal on your local machine.

2. Use the following SSH command to connect:

    ssh -i "your-key.pem" ec2-user@your-ec2-public-ip
   

3. Replace your-key.pem with your key file and your-ec2-public-ip with the instance’s public IP address.

Step 3: Install Grafana

1. Update the system packages:

    sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y   # For Ubuntu
    sudo yum update -y                       # For Amazon Linux
   

2. Add the Grafana repository and install Grafana:

   • For Ubuntu:

       sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common
       sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main"
       sudo apt-get update
       sudo apt-get install -y grafana
     

   • For Amazon Linux:

       sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/grafana.repo <<-'EOF'
       [grafana]
       name=grafana
       baseurl=https://packages.grafana.com/oss/rpm
       repo_gpgcheck=1
       enabled=1
       gpgcheck=1
       gpgkey=https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key
       EOF
       sudo yum install grafana -y
     

Step 4: Start and Enable Grafana

1. Start the Grafana service:

    sudo systemctl start grafana-server
   

2. Enable Grafana to start on boot:

    sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
   

3. Check the service status to ensure it’s running:

    sudo systemctl status grafana-server
   

Step 5: Access Grafana

1. Open a browser on your local machine.

2. Navigate to http://your-ec2-public-ip:3000.

3. Log in with the default credentials:

   • Username: admin

   • Password: admin

4. Change the default password as prompted for security reasons.

Optional Tasks for Exploration

1. Connect a Data Source: Add a data source like Prometheus or InfluxDB to Grafana and start visualizing metrics.

2. Create a Dashboard: Experiment with creating custom dashboards to represent your data visually.

3. Enable Alerts: Set up alerting rules to receive notifications for specific conditions.

Conclusion

Setting up Grafana on AWS EC2 is a valuable exercise that reinforces your understanding of monitoring and observability tools. With the steps outlined above, you’ll have a fully functional Grafana instance up and running in no time. Whether you’re monitoring server performance, application logs, or business metrics, Grafana’s flexibility and visual appeal make it an indispensable tool for any tech stack.

Now it’s your turn! Complete the setup, and share your experience in the comments. Let’s learn together! 🚀