Grafana PNP4Nagios Configuration on CentOS 7

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In this guide, you will learn about Grafana PNP4Nagios configuration on CentOS 7 or other Redhat based Linux distros. #centlinux #linux #grafana #nagios

What is Grafana ? :

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 Simple Grafana PNP4Nagios configuration, we are installing Nagios and Grafana on same machine, however, each of them can be installed on individual machine 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 (PAID LINK) by Packt Publishing. It will be really helpful for you during your Nagios journey.

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

Install Nagios 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 Nagios on CentOS 7.

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

Install PNP4Nagios on CentOS 7:

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

Install 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

Configure Linux Firewall:

Allow Grafana service port in Linux Firewall.

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

Grafana PNP4Nagios Configuration:

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.

Configure PNP4Nagios as a Data Source for Grafana:

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

grafana-login-01

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.

grafana-change-password-01_thumb

Set a new password and click on Save.

You are now at the Grafana Dashboard.

Grafana Dashboard

Click on Add Data Source.

grafana-choose-data-source-type-01_thumb

Choose the data source type here as PNP.

grafana-add-data-source-01_thumb

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.

grafana-create-dashboard-01_thumb

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

grafana-create-dashboard-01_thumb

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

grafana-new-panel-01_thumb

Click on Edit to add a data query.

grafana-add-query-01_thumb

We have defined a sample data query above.

Click on Save icon on top toolbar.

Grafana Save Changes

Enter a Dashbaord Name and click on Save.

grafana-dashboard-panel-01_thumb

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

Conclusion:

In this guide, you have learned about Grafana PNP4Nagios configuration 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.

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