How To Install Grafana on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grafana on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Grafana is an open-source data visualization and tracking suite. It offers support for Graphite, Elasticsearch, Included, Prometheus, and a lot more databases. The application gives a beautiful dashboard and metric analytics, with the capability to control and create your own dashboard for your own apps or infrastructure performance monitoring.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Grafana open-source data visualization and monitoring suite on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Grafana on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Grafana.

First, Add a new Grafana repository to the ‘sources.list.d’ directory, and then add the repository GPG key using the following commands:

echo 'deb https://packagecloud.io/grafana/stable/debian/ jessie main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
curl https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

Run the following command to install Grafana software:

apt-get update
apt-get install grafana

After the installation process is finished, execute the following commands to start your Grafana service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start grafana-server
systemctl enable grafana-server

Step 3. Accessing Grafana.

Grafana will be available on HTTP port 3000 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://mydomain.com:3000 and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 3000 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Grafana. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Grafana analytics and monitoring on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS  (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Grafana website.