How To Install Kapacitor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kapacitor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Kapacitor is an open-source framework for processing, monitoring, and alerting time series data. Kapacitor can process both stream and batch data from InfluxDB, acting on this data in real-time via its programming language TICKscript.

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 the Kapacitor real-time streaming data processing engine on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• 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 Kapacitor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

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

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Kapacitor on Ubuntu 20.04.

By default, Kapacitor is not available on Ubuntu 20.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to download the latest Kapacitor package installer to your Ubuntu system:

https://dl.influxdata.com/kapacitor/releases/kapacitor_1.6.3-1_amd64.deb

Then, run the following command to install the downloaded package:

sudo dpkg -i kapacitor_1.6.3-1_amd64.deb

Once the installation is complete, now enable Kapacitor (to start automatically upon system boot), start, and verify the status using the commands below:

sudo systemctl start kapacitor
sudo systemctl enable kapacitor
sudo systemctl status kapacitor

To verify the Kapacitor version, use the following command to confirm:

kapacitor version

Step 3. Configuration Kapacitor.

Now that our service is up and running, we can check the configuration to if it’s ok with the following command:

kapacitord config

To generate a new configuration file, run:

kapacitord config > kapacitor.generated.conf

For example configuration file can be found here.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Kapacitor. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Kapacitor open-source data processing framework on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Kapacitor website.