How to create Grafana Dashboard on AWS

 

Prerequisite:

1. You should have an working AWS Account

2. You should be able to run basic linux commands

3. Programming with python may ease understanding of some context although not necessary to know python

Step 1: Create a Key Pair

1. Sign into your AWS account and then click on the EC2 Service
   
   

   

2. Once in the EC2 UI, click on the Key Pairs link on the left navigation pane
   
   

   

3. On the Key Pairs UI, click on the Create key pair. This will open this form
   
   

   

4. Provide a name for this key, then for type either use RSA or ED25519. Please note, ED25519 is not supported on Windows.

5. Choose .pem file for use with openssh. On windows, you can use ssh command.

6. Click the Create Key Pair button and the browser will automatically download the key file. Keep this file safe. We will need this in our next steps.

Step 2: Create Security Group

1. Go to EC2 Console once again

2. On the left navigation pane, click Security Groups
   
   

   

3. Click on Create Security Group Button
   
   

   

4. Provide relevant information like the name and the default VPC of your region
   
   

   

5. Scroll down to add Inbound and Outbound Rules. These are the rules that will determine from where you are going to access your EC2 instance and for what purpose. Please be careful there.

6. For Inbound rules usually we want to access the web service ports from anywhere but we would like to restrict SSH access to the EC2 instance usually only to our local PC. AWS will automatically find our IP address.
   
   

   

7.  For outbound rules, leave default

8. Scroll down and click Create Security Group button

Step 3: Create EC2 Instance

1. Go to EC2 Dashboard and click on instances link
   
   

   

2. Click Launch instances button. This will open another form. Provide the instance a name
   
   

   

3. Choose Amazon Linux as OS Image
   
   

   

4. Choose t2.micro as instance type and select the key pair created on step 1
   
   

   

5. In the Network Settings section, choose the Security Group created in step 2
   
   

   

6. Leave other settings to default and click on Launch Instance button

Step 5: Modify IAM Role

1. Once the instance is created, select Modify IAM Role from Actions -> Security -> Modify IAM Role
   
   

   

2. Click Create new IAM Role link.
   
   

   

3. In this page, give the role a name and choose Prometheus related policies
   
   

   

4. On the EC2 page, use this role and click on Update IAM Role
   
   

   

Step 4: Connect to the EC2 Instance

1. Now you have to connect to the EC2 instance that you created in step 3.

2. On the EC2 Dashboard, click Instances link.

3. On the instances screen find your instances and click on it to see the details
   
   

   

4. You can see all the details now. Copy the Public IPV4 DNS
   
   

   

5. Open a Powershell/Command prompt window and run the following command

ssh -i tech-demo.pem ec2-user@<EC2 INSTANCE IPV4 DNS>

6. Now you are connected to the amazon linux instance

Step 5: Install required software and application on the EC2 Instance

1. Run the following commands

sudo yum update -y sudo yum install -y python pip pip install prometheus_client

2. Now create a metrics.py file with the following content. This will host a metrics endpoint on the EC2 Instance
   
   

   from prometheus_client import start_http_server, CollectorRegistry, Gauge, push_to_gateway import random import time import math registry = CollectorRegistry() g = Gauge('tech_demo_custom_metric', 'A custom metric data generated in python') @g.track_inprogress() def f(): pass with g.track_inprogress(): pass if __name__ == '__main__': start_http_server(8000) angle = 0 while(True): g.set(10 * math.cos(math.radians(angle + 90))) angle = angle + 1 time.sleep(5)

3. Run this file with the following

python metrics.py

4. Now run the following command to enable port forwarding of the metrics endpoint on your local machine

ssh -i tech-demo.pem -L 8000:localhost:8000 -N -f ec2-user@<EC2 IPV4 DNS>

5. Now open localhost:8000 on your browser to see the metrics 'tech_demo_custom_metric'

Step 6: Create an AWS Prometheus Workspace

1. Go to the Amazon Prometheus Dashboard
   
   

   

2. Click on Create button
   
   

   

3. Give it an alias and click on Create workspace button
   
   

   

4. Now you will see this workspace details. Keep a note of these
   
   

   

 

Step 7: Run Prometheus Server

1. Run the following commands on the EC2 Instance

wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.26.0/prometheus-2.26.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz tar -xvf prometheus-2.26.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz sudo cp prometheus-2.26.0.linux-amd64/prometheus /usr/local/bin/

2. Create a new file named prometheus.yaml, and edit the remote_write configuration with your workspace ID from the AMP workspace on the AWS console.

global: scrape_interval: 15s external_labels: monitor: 'prometheus' scrape_configs: - job_name: 'prometheus' static_configs: - targets: ['localhost:8000'] remote_write: - url: <Workspace write URL> queue_config: max_samples_per_send: 1000 max_shards: 200 capacity: 2500 sigv4: region: eu-west-1

3. We are finally ready to run Prometheus and send our application metrics to AMP.

prometheus --config.file=prometheus.yaml

4. This will now send the metrics data from the metrics endpoint we created on step 5 to the Amazon Prometheus

 

Step 8: Install Grafana

1. Run the following command to install Grafana on EC2 Instance

sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/grafana.repo

2. Now add the following content into the file

[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

3. Now run

sudo yum install grafana -y

4. Now enable Sigv4 Authentication by changing the configuration file

/usr/share/grafana/conf/defaults.ini

5. Set this configuration to true -

sigv4_auth_enabled

6. Reload the system daemon

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

7. Start the Grafana server