Deploy Prometheus and Grafana through the Linode Marketplace

This Marketplace App installs both Prometheus and Grafana, two open source tools that are commonly used together to collect and view data.

Use Prometheus to collect metrics and receive alerts. Prometheus monitors targets that you define at given intervals by scraping their metrics HTTP endpoints. This tool is particularly well-suited for numeric time series data, which makes it ideal for machine-centric monitoring as well as monitoring of highly dynamic service-oriented architectures.

Grafana is an analytics and monitoring solution with a focus on accessibility for metric visualization. You can use Grafana to create, monitor, store, and share metrics with your team to keep tabs on your infrastructure. Grafana is very lightweight and does not use a lot of memory and CPU resources.

Deploying a Marketplace App

The Linode Marketplace lets you easily deploy software on a Compute Instance using Cloud Manager. See Get Started with Marketplace Apps for complete steps.

1. Log in to Cloud Manager and select the Marketplace link from the left navigation menu. This displays the Linode Create page with the Marketplace tab pre-selected.

2. Under the Select App section, select the app you would like to deploy.

3. Complete the form by following the steps and advice within the Creating a Compute Instance guide. Depending on the Marketplace App you selected, there may be additional configuration options available. See the Configuration Options section below for compatible distributions, recommended plans, and any additional configuration options available for this Marketplace App.

4. Click the Create Linode button. Once the Compute Instance has been provisioned and has fully powered on, wait for the software installation to complete. If the instance is powered off or restarted before this time, the software installation will likely fail.

To verify that the app has been fully installed, see Get Started with Marketplace Apps > Verify Installation. Once installed, follow the instructions within the Getting Started After Deployment section to access the application and start using it.

Configuration Options

• Supported distributions: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
• Suggested plan: All plan types and sizes can be used.

Prometheus and Grafana Options

• Email address (required): Enter the email address to use for generating the SSL certificates.

Limited Sudo User

You need to fill out the following fields to automatically create a limited sudo user, with a strong generated password for your new Compute Instance. This account will be assigned to the sudo group, which provides elevated permissions when running commands with the sudo prefix.

• Limited sudo user: Enter your preferred username for the limited user. No Capital Letters, Spaces, or Special Characters.

  Locating The Generated Sudo Password

  A password is generated for the limited user and stored in a .credentials file in their home directory, along with application specific passwords. This can be viewed by running: cat /home/$USERNAME/.credentials

  For best results, add an account SSH key for the Cloud Manager user that is deploying the instance, and select that user as an authorized_user in the API or by selecting that option in Cloud Manager. Their SSH pubkey will be assigned to both root and the limited user.

• Disable root access over SSH: To block the root user from logging in over SSH, select Yes. You can still switch to the root user once logged in, and you can also log in as root through Lish.

  Accessing The Instance Without SSH

  If you disable root access for your deployment and do not provide a valid Account SSH Key assigned to the authorized_user, you will need to login as the root user via the Lish console and run cat /home/$USERNAME/.credentials to view the generated password for the limited user.

Custom Domain (Optional)

If you wish to automatically configure a custom domain, you first need to configure your domain to use Linode’s name servers. This is typically accomplished directly through your registrar. See Use Linode’s Name Servers with Your Domain. Once that is finished, you can fill out the following fields for the Marketplace App:

• Linode API Token: If you wish to use the Linode’s DNS Manager to manage DNS records for your custom domain, create a Linode API Personal Access Token on your account with Read/Write access to Domains. If this is provided along with the subdomain and domain fields (outlined below), the installation attempts to create DNS records via the Linode API. See Get an API Access Token. If you do not provide this field, you need to manually configure your DNS records through your DNS provider and point them to the IP address of the new instance.
• Subdomain: The subdomain you wish to use, such as www for www.example.com.
• Domain: The domain name you wish to use, such as example.com.

Akamai Insights Datasource Plugin (Optional)

If your Akamai account contract has Reporting enabled, you can take advantage of the Akamai Reporting API V2. This allows you to expose data to monitor traffic and analyze patterns and long-term trends directly in Grafana.

Before you begin: To get the values for required fields, you must have API client credentials. If you don’t know how to create an API client for your Akamai account, see Create EdgeGrid authentication credentials.

To add the plugin, enter your API client data into the corresponding fields. Note that leaving any fields blank will result in the plugin not being installed.

• Akamai client_secret: Enter your client_secret.
• Akamai host: Enter your Akamai host. This typically ends in luna.akamaiapis.net.
• Akamai access_token: Enter your access_token.
• Akamai client_token: Enter your client_token.

What to do next: Once the deployment finishes, you can check to confirm the plugin works using the steps provided under Akamai Insights Datasource.

Getting Started after Deployment

Access Grafana and Prometheus

To access the front end interfaces for either Grafana or Prometheus, first obtain the credentials. Then, open your web browser and navigate to the Location URL of the app you wish to access. In the login prompt that appears, enter the username and password as shown in the credentials.txt file.

Obtain the Credentials

Once the app has been fully deployed, you need to obtain the credentials from the server.

1. Log in to your new Compute Instance using one of the methods below:

   • Lish Console: Within Cloud Manager, navigate to Linodes from the left menu, select the Compute Instance you just deployed, and click the Launch LISH Console button. Log in as the root user. See Using the Lish Console.
   • SSH: Log in to your Compute Instance over SSH using the root user, or with the sudo user created during deployment. See Connecting to a Remote Server Over SSH for assistance.

2. Once logged in, find the URLs and credential files listed in the MOTD:

   cat /etc/motd

   *********************************************************
   Akamai Connected Cloud Prometheus & Grafana Marketplace App
   Grafana URL: https://$EXAMPLE_DOMAIN.COM
   Prometheus URL: https://$EXAMPLE_DOMAIN.COM/prometheus
   Credentials File: /home/$SUDO_USER/.credentials
   Documentation: https://www.linode.com/docs/products/tools/marketplace/guides/prometheus-grafana/
   *********************************************************

   To delete this message of the day, use rm /etc/motd.

3. The /home/$SUDO_USER/.credentials file contains the credentials for the created sudo user, Prometheus, and Grafana, as shown in the example output below:

   cat /home/$SUDO_USER/.credentials

   Sudo Username: $SUDO_USER
   Sudo Password: QAV!BHw3Ud-EcM4XYt3q
   Prometheus Username: prometheus
   Prometheus Password: XnYGi8CTPNKugQhaC9@2nze6
   Grafana Username: admin
   Grafana Password: *qs6.rbpWyb_rwKm3ciFYW82

Add Prometheus as a Data Source to Grafana

1. Log in to the Grafana front end. See Access Grafana and Prometheus.

2. On the main menu, hover over the gear icon to open the Configuration menu. Then click Data Sources.

3. Within the Data sources page that appears, click the Add data source button.

4. Select Prometheus from the Time series database section of the Add data source page.

5. A data source labeled Prometheus is automatically created and its configuration settings are now visible. Within the URL field, enter http://localhost:9090/prometheus. The rest of the settings can be adjusted as needed.

Now that the Prometheus Data Source is set, you can browse the available Grafana dashboards to see which dashboard fits your needs. Review the official Prometheus and Grafana documentation to learn how to further use your instance.

Akamai Insights Datasource

If you added the Akamai Insights Datasource plugin, the data source can be found in the Data sources tab.

Open akamai-insights-datasource and click Save & test to check if the plugin is working. If successful, you should see a “Data source is working properly” message.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

• Prometheus
• Grafana