Grafana

Grafana is an open-source observability platform for visualising metrics, logs, and traces. It connects to data sources such as InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and MySQL, and renders them as interactive dashboards with alerting. It is widely used for infrastructure monitoring, application performance tracking, and business intelligence.

Software included

Component	Version
Grafana OSS	Latest stable
Ubuntu	24.04 LTS

Getting started

1. Connect to your VM

ssh ubuntu@<your-vm-ip>

2. Verify Grafana is running

There is no first-boot configuration. Grafana starts immediately after the VM boots.

systemctl status grafana-server

3. Access the Grafana UI

Open a browser and navigate to:

http://<your-vm-ip>:3000

Field	Value
Username	`admin`
Password	`admin`

You will be prompted to set a new password on first login.

4. Add a data source

Once logged in:

Go to Connections → Data sources
Click Add data source
Select your data source type (InfluxDB, Prometheus, MySQL, etc.)
Enter the connection details and click Save & test

Managing Grafana

# Check service status
systemctl status grafana-server

# Restart
sudo systemctl restart grafana-server

# View logs
sudo journalctl -u grafana-server -f

Path	Purpose
`/etc/grafana/grafana.ini`	Main configuration
`/var/lib/grafana/`	Dashboards, plugins, and database

Security

Port 3000 is accessible on the VM’s network interface. UFW is enabled and allows SSH (port 22) only by default.

To allow browser access from a specific IP:

sudo ufw allow from <trusted-ip> to any port 3000

To access the UI without opening the firewall, use an SSH tunnel:

# Run this on your local machine
ssh -L 3000:localhost:3000 ubuntu@<your-vm-ip>

# Then open in browser
http://localhost:3000

For production use, place Grafana behind a reverse proxy such as Nginx or Caddy so you can serve it on port 443 with a TLS certificate.