Install Grafana with PNP4Nagios on CentOS 7

Grafana is a free and open source software to create graphs of numeric time-series data such as performance data of  computer systems. Grafana is biggest alternative visualization tool for Graphite today. Grafana can collect data from various data sources like Elastic Search, InfluxDB, CloudWatch, etc. Grafana support different types of graphical panels including Graphs, Heatmaps and Tables.

In this article, we will install Grafana on CentOS 7 and integrate Grafana with Nagios Core via PNP4Nagios plugin.

For Simplicity, we are installing Nagios Core and Grafana on same machine, however, Nagios Core and Grafana can be installed on individual machines if required.

Before moving forward, it is required to have basic concepts of Nagios Core 4. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you should have Learning Nagios - Third Edition by Packt Publishing. It will be really helpful for you during your Nagios journey.

Table of Contents:

• System Specification
• Installing Nagios Core on CentOS 7
• Installing PNP4Nagios Plugin for Nagios Core on CentOS 7
• Installing Grafana on CentOS 7
• Configuring PNP4Nagios as a Data Source for Grafana

 

System Specification:

We have provisioned a CentOS 7 virtual machine with following specifications:

• Hostname - nagios-01.example.com
• IP Address - 192.168.116.143/24
• Operating System - CentOS 7.6
• Nagios Version - Nagios Core 4.4

 

Installing Nagios Core on CentOS 7:

First of all, we required to configure a Nagios Core server to collect performance data from network and computers.

The procedure of installing Nagios Core is already described in our previous article Install & Configure Nagios Core 4.4 on CentOS 7.

Therefore, instead of reinventing the wheel, we are moving to next step.

 

Installing PNP4Nagios Plugin for Nagios Core on CentOS 7:

We have already wrote an article Install PNP4Nagios on Nagios Core over CentOS 7. Therefore, you should follow it to install and configure PNP4Nagios.

 

Installing Grafana on CentOS 7:

Browse URL http://docs.grafana.org/installation/rpm/ and download Grafana according to your operating system and platform.

# wget https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana-5.4.3-1.x86_64.rpm
--2019-02-17 20:56:42--  https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana-5.4.3-1.x86_64.rpm
Resolving dl.grafana.com (dl.grafana.com)... 151.101.26.217, 2a04:4e42:6::729
Connecting to dl.grafana.com (dl.grafana.com)|151.101.26.217|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 55015322 (52M) [application/x-redhat-package-manager]
Saving to: âgrafana-5.4.3-1.x86_64.rpmâ

100%[======================================>] 55,015,322   174KB/s   in 4m 45s

2019-02-17 21:01:28 (188 KB/s) - âgrafana-5.4.3-1.x86_64.rpmâ saved [55015322/55015322]

Install Grafana using yum command.

# yum install -y grafana-5.4.3-1.x86_64.rpm

Start and enable Grafana service.

# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl enable grafana-server.service
Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/grafana-server.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/grafana-server.service.
# systemctl start grafana-server.service

Allow Grafana service port in Linux Firewall.

# firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=3000/tcp
success
# firewall-cmd --reload
success

Install PNP plugin for Grafana.

# grafana-cli plugins install sni-pnp-datasource
installing sni-pnp-datasource @ 1.0.5
from url: https://grafana.com/api/plugins/sni-pnp-datasource/versions/1.0.5/download
into: /var/lib/grafana/plugins

â Installed sni-pnp-datasource successfully

Restart grafana after installing plugins . <service grafana-server restart>

Download Grafana API.

# cd /usr/local/pnp4nagios/share/application/controllers/
# wget -O api.php "https://github.com/lingej/pnp-metrics-api/raw/master/application/controller/api.php"
--2019-02-17 21:30:26--  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lingej/pnp-metrics-api/master/application/controller/api.php
Resolving raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)... 151.101.8.133
Connecting to raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)|151.101.8.133|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 11418 (11K) [text/plain]
Saving to: âapi.phpâ

100%[======================================>] 11,418      --.-K/s   in 0.01s

2019-02-17 21:30:26 (1.12 MB/s) - âapi.phpâ saved [11418/11418]

Restart Grafana service.

# systemctl restart grafana-server.service

Allow Access to PNP4Nagios web service by Grafana execute following or manually edit /etc/httpd/conf.d/pnp4nagios.conf file.

# sed -i '/Allow from all/a\        Allow from 127.0.0.1 ::1' /etc/httpd/conf.d/pnp4nagios.conf
# sed -i '/Require valid-user/a\        Require all granted' /etc/httpd/conf.d/pnp4nagios.conf
# sed -i 's/Allow from all/#&/' /etc/httpd/conf.d/pnp4nagios.conf
# sed -i 's/AuthName/#&/' /etc/httpd/conf.d/pnp4nagios.conf
# sed -i 's/AuthType Basic/#&/' /etc/httpd/conf.d/pnp4nagios.conf
# sed -i 's/AuthUserFile/#&/' /etc/httpd/conf.d/pnp4nagios.conf
# sed -i 's/Require valid-user/#&/' /etc/httpd/conf.d/pnp4nagios.conf

Restart Apache service.

# systemctl restart httpd.service

Test PNP4Nagios web service is locally accessed without authentication.

# curl http://localhost/pnp4nagios
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="http://localhost/pnp4nagios/">here</a>.</p>
</body></html>

We have obtained a 301 redirection error, it means that our configurations are OK.

 

Configuring PNP4Nagios as a Data Source for Grafana:

Browse the URL https://nagios-01.example.com:3000.

Login with default username admin and password admin.

Since, we are login for the first time on Grafana, therefore it will ask you to change the admin user’s password.

Set a new password and click on Save.

You are now at the Grafana Dashboard.

Click on Add Data Source.

Choose the data source type here as PNP.

Enter configurations as above and click on Save & Test.

If the configurations are correct then Grafana will display "Data source is working".

We have defined a data source PNP-1, now we have to create a dashboard for the data from our data source.

Click on the left toolbar to create a dashboard.

When click on Dashboard, it will ask you for the Panel type that we want to add in our Dashboard.

Let’s add a graph panel by clicking on Graph.

Click on Edit to add a data query.

We have defined a sample data query above.

Click on Save icon on top toolbar.

Enter a Dashbaord Name and click on Save.

Grafana has been collecting data from Nagios Core via PNP and display it in our Panel.

We have successfully install Grafana and integrate it with Nagios Core via PNP4Nagios plugin on CentOS 7. Although this article demonstrates a single type of Dashboard and Panel but you can experiment on your own to explore and design custom dashboards according to your requirement.